On the death of Henning Mankell: Against the wind – Tagesspiegel

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With the novels to the depressive policeman Kurt Wallander was Henning Mankell world famous and influential. Mankell lived in Africa, fighting hunger and poverty. Now he has died with 67 years in Gothenburg.

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As Henning Mankell 2014 his last, these days also in German under the title published “quicksand” published book, he dedicated it to his wife in addition to explicitly two people after Christ were killed in 79 the volcanic eruption in Pompeii, the baker Terentius Neo and his wife. “You can not have remained a lot of time to understand what happened,” Mankell writes in his dedication. “They died in the middle of life, buried by the ashes and the glowing lava.”

These rates is well documented, as it must be Mankell issued when he learned about two years ago that his neck pain is not a herniated disc based, but its cause had a malignant lung tumor. As a middle standing in life Mankell has still felt shortly before the diagnosis, at that time he was 65 years old, in spite of a will, which he had placed only a few months earlier and without symptoms or premonitions of death, to leave simply regulated certain things, but also around its own “mortality recognize”: “If you’re dead, you’re dead, then you can no longer influence.”

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However, unlike the inhabitants of Pompeii is Mankell, the Gothenburg succumbed to the effects of cancer on Monday morning, still enough time to understand, to one’s own to reflect on life and death in order not to sink into that very quicksand, as he felt the days after diagnosis. And that means it he had as a writer of course. Why he decided to write columns about his life with the disease, namely “to write exactly as it is. About the serious fight, which it always is. But I am going to write from the perspective of life, not of death “

His recent columns:. A confrontation with the disease, with death

To these columns he has expanded his last book he had begun already to his dispute with the disease, a legacy that is still grown quite differently than similar recent biographical books: a mixture of memoirs, particularly of childhood, and cultural history, in the depth of time looking considerations and questions like this: “Are there other worlds? Or only the darkness? What was there before time and space? What was there before there was anything at all “

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Of course these are questions, the more pressing questions in the face of death, which might provide reassurance. How insignificant but is its own existence! “The truth about our existence,” says Mankell in “quicksand”, “is always temporary.” Regardless, has Mankell, hard working, even if in the past weeks and months, interviews, has about himself, his life and work as well as information given about the refugee crisis in Europe. And of course he had always once again answer the question, but what he wants to be remembered: has considered the inventor of the Kurt Wallander, or as someone who is always used for the interests of the African continent, fighting against hunger and poverty, the front Location was active, as the operator of a theater in Mozambique capital Maputo, and there 30 years half of the year had its center of life.

Henning Mankell has dodged these questions after his fame prefer. Furthermore he did not speculate, knowing that that’s such a thing with his detective novels and their main character. Because appeared as the early nineties the first Wallander crime, “Faceless Killers”, this made him famous overnight. The following novels Mankell justified at all the boom of Scandinavian crime fiction, especially in Germany, and of the 40 million copies that have been sold by Mankell world, is the largest part on Wallander thrillers to mention, from the many television adaptations with this character represented by Rolf Lassgårdt, Kenneth Branagh and Krister Henriksson.