Wolfdietrich Schnurre

Wolfdietrich Schnurre (22 August 1920 – 9 June 1989) was a German writer. Best known for his short stories, he also wrote tales, diaries, poems, radio plays, and children's books. Born in Frankfurt am Main, and later raised in Berlin-Weißensee, he grew up in a lower-middle class family and did not receive a post-secondary education. He served in Nazi Germany's army from 1939 until 1945, when he escaped from a prisoner camp after having been arrested for desertion. He was briefly imprisoned by British troops; after his release he returned to Germany in 1946 and began to write commercially.

Schnurre's experiences during the Second World War informed the themes of his writings, which often discuss guilt and moral responsibility; though influenced by his socialist political views, his works aim at ethical activation of the reader and not political activism. He is sometimes considered a representative of the rubble literature movement, a short period in German literary history during which many authors, often former soldiers, sought to re-establish German literature after the incisive events of the war. He was a founding member of the literary association Gruppe 47, and his short story Das Begräbnis (The Funeral), which describes God's death and burial, was read at the group's first meeting in 1947. Guilt, remembrance and war experiences are central themes in all of his major works; short story collections Als Vaters Bart noch rot war (When father's beard was still red) and Als Vater sich den Bart abnahm (When father shaved his beard off) recount the experiences of the narrator and his father in lower-class Berlin during the period of the rise of Nazism, while his sole novel, Ein Unglücksfall (A misfortune, An accident) explores themes of guilt and responsibility surrounding the persecution of Jews under Nazi rule. Among his other major works is Der Schattenfotograf (The shadow photographer), a discontiguous collection of various texts.

He received many awards for his literary work, including the Immermann-Preis in 1959, the Bundesverdienstkreuz in 1981, and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1983. Schnurre remained a highly active writer from the 1940s through the 1970s, but his literary output decreased after he moved to Felde in the early 1980s. In 1989, he died of heart failure in Kiel.