Obituary for Hermann Peter Piwitt: “Once I saw death coming up the stairs”

It is part of the tragedy of the writer Hermann Peter Piwitt that he became, so to speak, part of literary history before he was able to develop himself as a writer. When Piwitt read his text at the Group 47 meeting in Princeton in 1966, the then 23-year-old Peter Handke stood up and hurled the somewhat delicate word about “description impotence” into the world. The diagnosis, made with adolescent anger, probably did not apply to Piwitt alone, but to a generation of young authors who experienced a kind of gentle introduction to the execution machine Group 47 in Walter Höllerer’s “Writing Workshop for Prose Writing” in the Literary Colloquium at the beginning of the 1960s: Hans Christoph Buch, Peter Bichsel, Hubert Fichte, some of them read to a larger public for the first time in Princeton.