Hoppe
Felicitas Hoppe
Felicitas Hoppe was born in 1960 Hamelin (Hameln) in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) in Germany. She lives in Berlin.
Hoppe’s fiction explores human subjectivity in the form of a voyage, and her characters are almost always on the move. Her work is postmodern in the sense that it is playful, ironic and extremely self-reflective: her fictions continually reflect on their own status as fictional discourses.
Fairy tales and medieval literature are important reference points in Hoppe’s work. Her short novel Johanna takes the life of Joan of Arc as a starting point for an exploration of contemporary relationships and the writing of history.
Hoppe uses both historical and imaginary figures in order to articulate her own highly distinctive voice. As she puts it in her imaginary autobiographical novel Hoppe (2012), she has created her own historical canon of assistants and representatives in order to get a clear insight into her own affairs (p. 106).
In 2005 Hoppe was awarded the Brothers Grimm Prize and in 2007 she was elected as a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature. In 2012 she was awarded Germany’s prestigious Büchner Prize with the following citation:
Die Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung
verleiht den Georg-Büchner-Preis 2012
Felicitas Hoppe
die mit ihrer eigensinnigen und abenteuerlustigen Prosa Grundfragen eines postmodernen Daseins mit virtuoser, befreiender Phantasie durchspielt,
die in ihren Romanen und Erzählungen die Wahrheiten der Märchen, Mythen und Legenden wieder ins Recht setzt,
die auf den Spuren der Entdecker, Heiligen und Taugenichtse die Grenzen von Wahrheit und Fiktion, Selbsterkenntnis und Rollenspiel unterläuft und beharrlich danach fragt, was es heißt, Ich zu sagen.
The German Academy for Language and Literature
awards the Georg Büchner Prize 2012
to Felicitas Hoppe
who, with her obstinate and adventurous prose, plays out the fundamental questions of postmodern existence with virtuosic, liberating fantasy,
who in her novels and stories restores the truths of fairy tales, myths and legends,
who, by going on the trail of discoverers, saints and good-for-nothings, circumvents the borders between truth and fiction, self-recognition and role-play, and persistently asks what it means to say ‘I’.
Hoppe’s short stories include:
Unglückselige Begebenheiten (1991) [Unhappy Occurrences]
Picknick der Friseure (1996) [Hairdressers’ Picnic]
Verbrecher und Versager. Fünf Porträts (2004) [Delinquents and Losers. Five Portraits]
Der beste Platz der Welt (2009) [The World’s Best Place]
Her novels include:
Pigafetta (1999)
Paradiese, Übersee (2003) [Paradises, Overseas]
Hoppe (2012)
Prawda. Eine amerikanische Reise (2018) [Pravda. An American Journey]
Other works by Felicitas Hoppe include:
Iwein Löwenritter. Erzählt nach dem Roman von Hartmann von Aue (2008) [Iwein, the Knight of the Lion, told after the novel by Hartmann von Aue]
Sieben Schätze. Augsburger Vorlesungen (2009) [Seven Treasures. Augsburg Lectures]
Abenteuer – was ist das? (2010) [Adventure – what is it?]
Web Link in English
http://www.litrix.de/en/buecher.cfm?publicationId=644
Introduction to Hoppe’s Iwein, the Knight of the Lion, by Eva Kaufmann
Web Links in German
Author website
http://www.hundertvierzehn.de/artikel/fragen-wie-fichte-2-felicitas-hoppe_39.html
Interview with Felicitas Hoppe
http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-3319-1/ehrliche-erfindungen
Svenja Frank and Julia Ilgner (eds.), Ehrliche Erfindungen. Felicitas Hoppe als Erzählerin zwischen Tradition und Transmoderne (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017)
http://www.felicitas-hoppe-sagt.de/
Felicitas Hoppe sagt (2017 film, directed by Oliver Held and Thomas Henke)
Further Reading in English
Stephanie Obermeier, ‘“Im beweglichen Umgang mit den störrischen Fakten”: Attitudes to Genre in Felicitas Hoppe’s Prawda: Eine amerikanische Reise (2018)’, German Life and Letters 72:3 (2019), 378-98
Further Reading in German
Thomas Homscheid and Esbjörn Nyström (eds.), Geschichten des Reisens – Reisen zur Geschichte. Studien zu Felicitas Hoppe, Schwedische Studien zur deutschsprachigen Literatur (Uelvesbüll: Der Andere Verlag, 2012)
Stefan Neuhaus and Martin Hellstrom (eds.), Felicitas Hoppe im Kontext der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur, Angewandte Literaturwissenschaft, Band 1 (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2008)