Johannes Mario Simmel

Simmel's parents came from Hamburg. His Jewish father Walter Simmel was a chemist, his mother Lisa, née Schneider, was an editor at the film company Wien-Film. His father fled from the Nazis to London, while almost all of his paternal relatives were murdered by the Nazis. Simmel grew up in Austria and England and graduated as a chemical engineer from the Higher Federal Teaching and Research Institute for the Chemical Industry in Vienna. During the Second World War, he was employed in the electrochemical research department of the electrical company Kapsch in Vienna. On April 5, 1945, he witnessed the murder of scientists who wanted to save an electron microscope from the ordered destruction. He addressed this in his 1980 novel Wir heißen euch hoffen. After the war, he first worked as a journalist, translator and interpreter for the US military government, which was responsible for the American sector in the four-power city of Vienna and for the American occupation zone of Salzburg and Upper Austria south of the Danube. In 1947 he published his first collection of novellas under the title Encounter in the Fog. At the Viennese daily newspaper Welt am Abend, which was discontinued at the end of October 1948, he wrote film reviews and feuilletons as a cultural editor in its last year of publication. In 1950 he moved to Munich and worked there for the illustrated magazine Quick. On their behalf, he undertook reporter trips through Europe and overseas.Johannes M. Simmel wrote factual reports and serial novels under various pseudonyms. From 1950 to 1962 he wrote a total of 22 screenplays, alone or together with other authors, including films such as Es geschehen noch Wunder (1951) with Hildegard Knef, Tagebuch einer Verliebte (1953) with Maria Schell, Hotel Adlon (1955) or Robinson soll nicht sterben (1957) with Romy Schneider and Horst Buchholz. After his first major success with the novel Es muss nicht immer Kaviar sein (It Must Not Always Be Caviar) in 1960, he devoted himself primarily to writing light novels, each of which dealt with current socio-politically relevant topics such as violence against foreigners, drug trafficking or genetic manipulation. The basis was journalistic research at the locations and in the milieu in which his novels were set.

The leitmotifs in many of his works were the relativization of good and evil and a passionate pacifism. He was one of the most widely read authors in the German-speaking world. His 35 novels reached a total circulation of over 73 million copies sold. They have been translated into 30 languages and filmed by directors such as Alfred Vohrer and Roland Klick. Marlene Dietrich admired his work and maintained close telephone contact with him. For a long time, Simmel was described by literary critics as a trivial author, "bestseller mechanic" or assembly line writer. It was not until the novel But with the Clowns Came the Tears (1987) that he gained general recognition.

Married three times, he last lived in the Swiss city of Zug. Simmel died on 1 January 2009 in Lucerne. According to him, he still had a novel in the works.