Patrick Süskind

Patrick Süskind
Occupation	Writer, screenwriter
Period	1980 - present
Literary movement	Magic realism
Notable works	Perfume, The Pigeon, The Story of Mr Sommer

Patrick Süskind (born March 26, 1949) is a German writer and screenwriter.

Life and work

The public knows little about Patrick Süskind. He has withdrawn from the literary scene in Germany and never grants interviews or allows photos. He was born in Ambach am Starnberger See, near Munich in Germany. His father was writer and journalist Wilhelm Emanuel Süskind, who worked for the well-established Süddeutsche Zeitung and is famous as the co-author of the well-known "Wörterbuch eines Unmenschen", a critical collection of essays on the language of the Nazi era. Patrick Süskind went to school in Holzhausen, a little Bavarian village. His mother worked as a sports trainer; his older brother Martin E. Süskind is also a journalist. Süskind has many relatives from the aristocracy in Württemberg, making him one of the descendants of the exegete Johann Albrecht Bengel and of the reformer Johannes Brenz. After his Abitur and his Civilian Service, he studied Medieval and Modern History at the University of Munich and in Aix-en-Provence from 1968-1974. Süskind also attended classes in English, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Politics, Art and Theology but, apparently, never graduated. Financially supported by his parents, he moved to Paris where he wrote "mainly short, unpublished fiction and longer screenplays which were not made into films" as he once said self-deprecatingly.

He had his breakthrough with the play The Double Bass. In the theatre season 1984/85 there were more than 500 performances of the piece, which made it a best-selling play for several seasons. It is still often performed. At the centre of the play stands a tragi-comical orchestral musician, who has so many problems with his instrument and his insignificance that he falls into nagging fatalism. In the 1980s Süskind was also successful as a screenwriter for the TV productions Kir Royal (1987) and Monaco Franze (1983), among others. For his screenplay of ''Rossini'', directed by Helmut Dietl he gained the Screenplay Prize of the German Department for Culture in 1996. He rejected other awards, like the respectable FAZ-Literaturpreis by a conservative German newspaper, the Tukanpreis and the Gutenbergpreis.

His best-known work is the internationally-acclaimed bestseller Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985). This was made into a film in 2006 by Tom Tykwer and is the only story of his to have reached the cinema to date. With more than 12 million copies sold and translations into 46 languages, he is probably the most well-known contemporary German writer in the world. His novel was on the bestselling list of the German weekly news magazine "Spiegel" for nine years. He is also the author of a novella, The Pigeon (1988), The Story of Mr. Sommer (1991), Three Stories and a Reflection (1996), and a collection of essays, On Love and Death (2006).

Süskind lives reclusively in Munich, in Seeheim (Lake Starnberg) and in France (probably Paris and Montolieu). This is one of the reasons why he is said to be eccentric, sensitive and neurotic. He even avoids book-signing tours and is not in touch with other authors.

Selected works

• Perfume
• The Story of Mr Sommer
• The Pigeon
• Double Bass (play)
• Rossini (film)
• Three Stories and a Reflection
• On Love and Death (essays)

A movie based on Perfume was released in 2006.

External links

• The Literary Encyclopedia page for Patrick Süskind
• Smee, Jess. "Critics sniffy over Perfume, the 'unfilmable' film", The Guardian, September 8, 2006.
• Urs, Jenny. "Worth the Wait?", Spiegel International, September 8, 2006.
• The book doesn't smell either": Dietmar Kammerer interviews director Tom Tykwer, at Sign and Sight, September 20, 2006 (originally appeared in German in Die Tageszeitung on September 14, 2006).

References

Delseit, Wolfgang and Drost, Ralf. Patrick Süskind. Das Parfum. Erläuterungen und Dokumente. Stuttgart: Reclam 2000.