Oskar Maria Graf

Vocation

German regional novelist and poet known for novels and sketches of Bavarian peasant life. Graf’s writing is marked by frank realism and by his own socialist and pacifist beliefs, but these are tempered by humorous affection for his subjects. An apprentice baker, Graf went to Munich in 1911, where he supported himself with a variety of menial jobs. Drafted into military service, he was a soldier at the Russian front during World War I. Graf married Karoline Bretting on 26 May 1917, and they had a daughter Annemarie (* 13 June 1918; † 8 December 2008) called „Annamirl“. The couple separated in 1918. Graf joined a revolutionary socialist group and, in 1918, participated in a strike by munitions workers and in the November Revolution that resulted in the short-lived Socialist Republic of Bavaria. After its demise in 1919, Graf worked as a director for the Munich Workers’ Theatre before turning to writing. In 1933 Graf fled Germany for Vienna and later for Czechoslovakia. Because his books were not among those listed by the Nazis to be banned from libraries and burned, on 12 May 1933 he published an article in a Vienna newspaper titled Verbrennt mich (burn me). In 1934 the Nazis arranged a special book buring for him in the courtyard of Munich university. His work was forbidden and his German nationality cancelled. In 1938 he left Europe and eventually settled in New York, with his Jewish wife Mirjam Sachs. They lived together since 1919 and were married on 2 October 1944, when the divorce from his first wife went through. They stayed together until her death in 1959, but Graf was a womanizer and had many wild affairs. In 1962 he married his third wife Gisela Blauner. His early work centres on themes of social revolution and protest, ideas that were never totally absent from his work, but he found his genre in stories of Bavarian folk life. He was concerned about the effects of modernity on traditional lives. Those fears are voiced in several novels about the future. He died 28 June 1967, New York. Link to Wikipedia biography