The Hero and his Weather

The dissertation by Friedrich Christian Delius - published for the first time 40 years ago – is now available again here.

The hero fails tragically, sways on the threshold of disaster or conquers his enemies, is triumphant – always accompanied by the appropriate weather. But who is accompanying who here? And what is behind all this?
In his dissertation »The Hero and his Weather«, published for the first time in 1971 , Friedrich Christian Delius addresses exactly these questions. He backs his answers up with the great prose of bourgeois realism, up to the 20th century. Jean Paul, Wilhelm Raabe, Otto Ludwig, Theodor Fontane and Friedo Lampe are called in for support, as chroniclers of an era in which the class structure of modern times was slowly evolving and becoming established.

The surprising thing here is the lightness and freshness with which Delius approaches this research: it makes entertaining reading even for those who are not scholars of German, and is illuminating for those who are familiar with the author’s later works. Or to use the words of Heinrich Detering: »It has become a kind of primeval scene in his work«.


The Author
Friedrich Christian Delius, born in 1943, studied literary studies at the FU and TU in Berlin, and did his PhD with Walter Höllerer. From 1970 to 1978 he worked as a publishing editor, and since 1978 as a freelance author. After receiving many distinctions, he was honoured with the Joseph Breitbach Prize in 2007 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 2011.
Publications include:
The Woman for whom I Invented the Computer (2009),

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman (2006),

The Walk from Rostock to Syracuse (1995); The Sunday I Became World Champion (1994); The Pears of Ribbeck (1991). His works have been translated into 17 languages.