Hanns-Josef Ortheil (born 5 November 1951, in Cologne[1]) is a German author, scholar of German literature, and pianist. He has written many autobiographical and historical novels, some of which have been translated into 11 languages, according to WorldCat:[2] French, Dutch, Modern Greek, Spanish, Chinese, Lithuanian, Japanese, Slovenian, and Russian.
He was born the fifth son in an educated family; his mother, Mary Catherine Ortheil, was a librarian and his father a railroad surveyor and director.[3] As a child, he did not speak, because his mother had temporarily lost her speech, following the loss of four sons during the Second World War.[3] When Ortheil learned to play the piano, this was for him the first time he could express himself and communicate with the world around him. He at first wanted to be a pianist, and studied for a period at the Rome Conservatory.[3]
In Germany he attended the Mainz Rabanus-Maurus-Gymnasium, and then the Universities of Mainz, Göttingen, Paris and Rome. His subjects were musicology, philosophy, Germanic, and comparative literature. During this time, he worked as a film and music journalist for the Mainz Allgemeine Zeitung. In 1976 he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the theory of the novel in the era of the French Revolution at the German Institute of the University of Mainz.[4]
Among his published works is a travel narrative (Die Moselreise) he had already written as a boy of eleven, when his father took him on a tour of the Moselle. Ortheil was a feature writer and literary critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, TIME, The World, Der Spiegel and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He is professor for creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim.[5] In 2006 he was appointed as honorary professor at the University of Heidelberg.[4] Since 2009, he is director of the newly established Institute for Literary Writing and Literary Studies at the Hildesheim Foundation University.[4]
