Umberto Eco is dead – SPIEGEL ONLINE

The Italian writer Umberto Eco is dead. As reported Italian media, citing the family, he died on Friday night at the age of 84 years. The family said he died around 22.30. Eco had cancer a long time ago.

Umberto Eco was known primarily as an author. But the Italians also went up as a philosopher and linguist name. He was born on January 5, 1932 as the son of an accountant in northern Italy Alessandria.

With his novel “The Name of the Rose”, he became world famous, especially after the book by Jean-Jacques Annaud starring Sean Connery was filmed in the lead role. Millions of readers kidnapped Eco so on a literary journey into the Middle Ages. He took her into the strange world of a Benedictine monastery in the Italian Apennines, where the monk William of Baskerville enlightens a grisly series of murders in the early 14th century. His first resoundingly successful novel was followed by several more, the international successes celebrated: “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988), “The Island of the Day Before” (1994) and “Baudolino” (2000) have become international bestsellers. 2011 published the German edition of his novel “The Prague Cemetery”.

When Eco is the first time tried his hand as a novelist, he was already a seasoned scientist and publicist. In Turin, he studied philosophy and literature. After graduating in 1954 he worked for several years as a cultural editor at the state television RAI, after which he was editor of the Milanese publishing house Bompiani. 1971 appointed it the University of Bologna as a professor of semiotics (theory of signs), where in 1975 he got the chair.

In opposition to Berlusconi

As early as 1956 Eco had published his first book, but no novel, subject was “The question of aesthetics in St. Thomas”. But he never felt for researchers in an ivory tower called but also mixed in the public life of his country with strong word. The militant, but unorthodox left wrote articles for the left newspaper “Il Manifesto” – temporarily under the pseudonym “Dedalus” – and counted in 1979 the founders of the literary monthly magazine “Alfa Beta”.

into old age, he was a columnist for a number of Italian daily newspapers and the weekly magazine “L’Espresso”. Together with like-minded people, he founded in 2002 the group “Libertà e Giustizia” ( “Freedom and Justice”), which saw itself as an intellectual opposition to the policies of the longstanding Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The pleasure of fiction not lost the Piemontese and placed at a distance of about each half a decade before a new novel. Again and again it went back in time in the sometimes quite distant past eras.

In the “zero point” (2015), however, dealt Eco with press and politics in post-war Italy. He moved the action only two decades earlier, in 1992, to. In a “time” interview he called for pragmatic reasons: In 1992, the era of the Internet had not yet begun.

After his first six novels Eco also wrote another book about writing novels. His reflections on writing and literature published shortly before his 80th birthday in German under the title “Confessions of a young writer” (2011). By that he meant himself. Because he started his literary career so late that he was still “quite a youngster and secure promising novelist,” Eco wrote with a wink.

had with his German wife Renate Ramge Eco a daughter and a son.