E. L. Doctorow: Kleist’s only student – ZEIT ONLINE

created in his novels E. L. Doctorow own era. The writing itself he considered socially acceptable variant of schizophrenia. An obituary

22nd July 2015 18:36 Clock

The American writer Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, 2007 | © Elisabetta Villa / Getty Images

In photos he looks like a mischievous watchmakers , reluctant behavior amusing, perhaps even a bit skeptical. With a slow-motion before the mind’s eye he incubated the mechanics in the movement of narration. In each of his novels own era emerged. He realized the narration as a system of knowledge that creates itself. That made him a writer who took to the historical subjects of his novels, reflect on their presence. The protests against the Vietnam War of the sixties brought him back to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the civil rights movement to General Sherman’s March in the American Civil War.

The grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, was born on January 6, 1931 in New York , already knew the age of nine, he would become a writer. “I began to ask two questions, while I was reading a book that inspired me,” Doctorow once said. “As this is not just what will happen next, but also possible. How can it be that these words make on the side that I so feel like I feel?”

His first novel – Welcome to Hard Times , a Western spoof – appeared in 1960. Before that he made in the early fifties his military service near Darmstadt. He then worked as a dramaturge for Columbia Pictures and examined novels, whether it was worthwhile to film them, not a bad school for his extraordinary visual narrative style, especially since he knew that telling a story differently can pursue as a film.

His technical experience as an author also mentioned that he worked as an editor of authors like James Baldwin and Norman Mailer several years benefited. The years as a scout and editor sharpened the artisanal sense of the peculiar restlessness of storytelling. This work, he differed from that of the historian with a disarming answer: the historians tell what happened, the novelist, what it felt like.

In Ragtime , his most successful novel, he linked the early history of film, Freud’s lectures in New York, the maternal love of the escape artist Houdini, the prehistory of the American labor movement, the women’s movement and the history of tabloid journalism with an American revenant of Heinrich von Kleist’s Kohlhaas, who bears the name Michael Coalhouse Walker in Ragtime .

In Billy Bathgate , Doctorow’s response on Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities , he illustrates the seduction of a young man. The story of the messenger boy from the Bronx reflects the rampage of the “greed is good” philosophy of Wall Street bankers in a role model from the years of the Depression, the gangster Dutch Schultz.

In his last novel Homer & amp; Langley he tells the story of two brothers who transform their large Upper West Side house on Fifth Avenue in a messie landfill. Langley acts as a harbinger of Internet Ausdruckers, not only collects every available newspaper, but also pianos, typewriters, tapes, weapons, television – iconic representations of American culture. At the same time the novel tells the story of New York in the 20th century. The acquisitiveness Langley is a harbinger Google, Langley is a thing aggregator.