Franz Karl Stanzel, now 90 years of age and since 1993 a professor emeritus in English Studies at the University of Graz in Austria, is best known for his pioneering book on narratology, A Theory of Narrative – published in German in 1979 and in English translation by Cambridge University Press in 1982. He has also had a long-lasting interest in the literatures of the two World Wars and in Canadian writing about the wars. He is author of the 1987 essay “Englische und deutsche Kriegsdichtung 1914-1918: Ein kompararistische Versuch,” co-editor of the 1993 essay collection Intimate enemies : English and German literary reactions to the Great War 1914-1918, and co-editor of the 1986 essay collection Encounters And Explorations : Canadian Writers And European Critics. This past September he published his autobiography, Verlust einer Jugend (Loss of a Youth), with the German publisher Königshausen & Neumann.
I first met Franz Stanzel at the 1988 Grainau Canadian Studies conference in Bavaria, held at a rustic lodge a few kilometers southwest of Garmisch Partenkirchen, site of the 1936 Winter Olympics, and a similar distance northeast of the Eibsee with its huge resort hotel which from 1940 to 1945 was requisitioned as a recreation centre by the Luftwaffe. Midway through the conference we took a long walk through snowy pine woods and I casually asked my genial companion how he had become interested in Canadian literature. He replied that it had been a complicated war-time accident, that he had been a prisoner of war in Quebec. He added that on Germany’s March 1938 invasion of Austria, when he was 14, his family had fled to Rumania, which a military coup however would soon make a German ally. Forced to join the German armed forces, he had enlisted in the navy in late 1940. His U-boat was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1942, he was rescued by the British and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Quebec. He was surprised to find the prisoners there encouraged to plant and maintain a vegetable garden. The food was better than his parents had been eating in wartime Europe. Kindly elderly women brought the younger prisoners like himself both cookies and books, including classic works of English literature. On
I first met Franz Stanzel at the 1988 Grainau Canadian Studies conference in Bavaria, held at a rustic lodge a few kilometers southwest of Garmisch Partenkirchen, site of the 1936 Winter Olympics, and a similar distance northeast of the Eibsee with its huge resort hotel which from 1940 to 1945 was requisitioned as a recreation centre by the Luftwaffe. Midway through the conference we took a long walk through snowy pine woods and I casually asked my genial companion how he had become interested in Canadian literature. He replied that it had been a complicated war-time accident, that he had been a prisoner of war in Quebec. He added that on Germany’s March 1938 invasion of Austria, when he was 14, his family had fled to Rumania, which a military coup however would soon make a German ally. Forced to join the German armed forces, he had enlisted in the navy in late 1940. His U-boat was sunk in the Mediterranean in 1942, he was rescued by the British and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Quebec. He was surprised to find the prisoners there encouraged to plant and maintain a vegetable garden. The food was better than his parents had been eating in wartime Europe. Kindly elderly women brought the younger prisoners like himself both cookies and books, including classic works of English literature. On
RSS Feed