Arno Schmidt - Biography

Biography

Born in Hamburg, son of a police constable, Schmidt moved with his widowed mother to Lauban (in Lusatia, then Lower Silesia, now Polish) and attended the secondary school in Görlitz. He then worked as a clerk in a textile company in Greiffenberg. At the outset of World War II in 1939, Schmidt was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He first served in Alsace and after 1941 in fairly quiet Norway. In 1945, Schmidt volunteered for active duty at the front in Northern Germany in order to be granted a brief home visit, as was the custom. He used that visit to organize a defection from Lusatia westwards for him and his wife, in order to evade capture by the Red Army, which was famed for its abuse of prisoners of war (POW) and German civilians in the east, and gave himself up to British forces in the German province of Lower Saxony.

After an interlude as an English POW and later as an interpreter at a police school, Schmidt started his future life as a freelance writer during the time of wandering that followed the war. Since Schmidt's pre-war home in Lauban was in the part of Germany placed under Polish administration after the war, Schmidt became part of the throng of refugees moved by the authorities from village to village in West Germany. This included stints in Cordingen (in the Bomlitz county of Lower Saxony), Gau-Bickelheim, and Kastel (both in the newly formed province of Rhineland-Palatinate). In Kastel, he was accused in court of blasphemy and moral subversion, which was then still prosecuted in the Catholic parts of West Germany. As a result, Schmidt and his wife moved to the Protestant city of Darmstadt in Hesse, where the suit against him was dismissed. In 1958, the Schmidts moved to the small village of Bargfeld (near Celle) in Lower Saxony, where they were to stay (cf. Martynkewicz 1992).