Herbert Rosendorfer
Herbert Rosendorfer was born in the village of Gries (currently in the province of Bolzano) in the South Tyrol. From 1939 to 1943, he lived in Munich. In 1943, he was evacuated to Kitzbühel, returning to Munich five years later.
After finishing school, Rosendorfer spent a year studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich but then entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Munich.
Between 1967 and 1993, Rosendorfer served as a judge in Munich, after which he was a Justice at the High Court of Appeal in Naumburg. Also, from 1990, he was an honorary professor of the history of Bavarian literature at the University of Munich.
Following his retirement, he lived in Eppan, in the South Tyrol, till his death on 20 September 2012.
Rosendorfer was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, as well as the Academy of Sciences and Literature (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur) in Mainz. He received the 1977 Toucan Prize, the 1991 Ernst Hoferichter Award, the 1992 Upper Bavarian Cultural Prize, the 1999 Jean-Paul Prize, and the 2010 Corine Literature Prize for his lifetime achievements.
He was honoured with the Order of Merit, First Class (2000), the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class and the Bavarian Order of Merit in 2004.
Works
“I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories.”