Heinz G. Konsalik

According to his own unconfirmed statements, Heinz Günther came from an old Saxon noble family (Freiherren von Günther, Ritter zu Augustusberg), who gave up their title in the Wilhelmine era. His father was an insurance director. Günther wrote his first Wild West novel at the age of ten. At the age of 16, Heinz Günther was already writing feature articles for Cologne newspapers. In 1938, he published what he described as his ‘first useful poem’. On 31 August 1939, he completed the heroic tragedy Der Geuse as a high school student. Afterwards, he joined the Hitler Youth, area 11 Middle Rhine. In December 1939, he began working for the Gestapo. His next drama, which he completed in March 1940, was called Gutenberg. In the same year, Günther applied for admission to the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Writers), but was initially rejected because the scope of his literary activity was still too small. Soon afterwards, however, he fulfilled the admission requirements and was granted the chamber membership required for the regular publication of literary works, and after graduating from Humboldt-Gymnasium in Cologne, he studied medicine, later switching to theatre studies, literary history and German studies. During the Second World War, he became a war correspondent in France and later served as a soldier on the Eastern Front, where he was seriously wounded in the Soviet Union (arm wound near Smolensk). In his photo picture book, he describes his impressions of Stalingrad: He would later describe his time at war in Russia as a ‘tremendous school’.

After returning from the war, he moved in with his mother, who had been evacuated from Cologne to Attendorn in Sauerland. He first worked as a publishing editor, then as an editor and finally as deputy editor-in-chief of Lustige Illustrierte and as a dramaturge. He published his first novel Liebesspiel mit Jubilar (later renamed Der Gentleman) in 1948 as Heinz Günther Konsalik. He later shortened his surname.

Heinz Konsalik initially continued to live in Attendorn. His wife Elsbeth, with whom he had daughters Almut (1951) and Dagmar (1955), was a teacher there. He later moved with his family to Aegidienberg, a district of Bad Honnef, which was popularly christened ‘Konsalik-Hügel’ after him. Among other things, he owned three bungalows in the village with a rose garden, swimming and barbecue centre and stables, which were used by his two daughters. Konsalik was a music lover, enjoyed listening to Wagner and Tchaikovsky and regularly attended the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, where he became a freelance writer in 1951 and was one of the most successful authors of light fiction after the publication of The Doctor of Stalingrad (1956). Konsalik did not receive an entry permit to the USSR until 1987 because of the novel The Doctor of Stalingrad.Konsalik recommended that his readers read A Cross in Siberia for a Man, A Happy Marriage for a Woman and Wild Fruits for Dessert for a Teenager. One of the ‘makers’ behind Konsalik's bestselling successes was the media manager Josef von Ferenczy.Konsalik's novels were distributed by various publishers: his own Hestia Verlag in Bayreuth, Bertelsmann Verlag in Munich and Heyne Verlag, which produced the paperback editions, as well as Goldmann Verlag in Lichtenberg, Lübbe and Schneekluth. In South Africa, Konsalik became the most popular German author. His audience-friendly novels were aimed at all social classes. Preprints appeared regularly in magazines such as Quick and Bunte. In 1984, Konsalik published his one hundredth novel, Die strahlenden Hände. At the time, Konsalik had a worldwide print run of 65 million books in 22 languages. His own publishing house, Hestia, celebrated his success with the words: ‘Every 10th second - day or night - someone somewhere in the world buys a Konsalik book. At least 3.2 million Konsalik novels are sold around the world every year. ‘Some of Konsalik's novels have been made into films, including The Stalingrad Doctor (1958, with Mario Adorf and Michael Ande), Strafbataillon 999 (1959) and Nights of Love in the Taiga (1967). The print run of The Stalingrad Doctor increased from 8,000 to 80,000 copies after the film version. Strafbataillon 999 was still being shown on West German television in 1985. The book on which the film is based, which describes the experiences of doomed soldiers in a punishment battalion and went into 29 editions, was described by the publisher as ‘tough’ and ‘realistic’. In 1985, Liebe läßt alle Blumen blühen was made into a film by NDR. The film was heavily criticised for its amateurish style after it was broadcast.

The magazine Der Spiegel, for example, mocked that the film crew must have started from the motto: ‘Anyone who reads Konsalik will believe anything.’ Konsalik said of his two works Der Arzt von Stalingrad and Sie waren zehn that they were written ‘the way they want it.’ At the age of 75, Konsalik was cheated by his investment advisor and lost a fortune of DM 9 million, including all rights to his books. The author recovered from the loss through the income from his new works, and Konsalik spent the last seven years of his life separated from his wife Elsbeth in Salzburg, where he lived with the Chinese woman Ke Gao, 44 years his junior. There are speculations that he no longer wrote himself in recent years, but employed ghostwriters who did at least some of the research or took on the projects themselves in view of the tight deadlines set by the publishers. However, this was denied by Konsalik's daughter Dagmar Stecher-Konsalik. She relativised the cooperation with service providers as ‘editing, preparation and elaboration’. His daughter once commented on her father's work as follows: Peter Heim, an author friend (author of novels for TV series such as Die Schwarzwaldklinik and Dream Island) who lived on Mallorca, is said to have taken over some of Konsalik's writing duties during this time. Heim and Konsalik had written series together for the magazine Quick in the 1960s. The work Im Auftrag des Tigers (1996), which was marketed as the 150th Konsalik book, was actually written by Peter Heim, although it contains typical Konsalik formulations.When the severely diabetic Konsalik died of a stroke in his Salzburg home at the age of 78, he had achieved a worldwide circulation of 83 million with his life's work of 155 novels, which were written in 43 creative years and deal with ‘everyday war life, violence, sex and other trivialities’. One month after his death, the Hamburger Morgenpost reported that Konsalik already had 45 new titles in progress that had been discovered in his estate. His agent Reinhold Stecher put the discovery into perspective by stating that it only concerned two unfinished manuscripts and various collections of ideas in the form of keywords.