Umberto Eco

Eco spent his childhood and youth as the son of a lower middle-class family - his father Giulio Eco was an accountant - in the southern Piedmontese provincial capital of Alessandria and its surroundings, which had a strong influence on him. Eco later wrote directly or indirectly about the town and the landscape, the character and basic mood of the people living there and everyday life in the 1930s and early 1940s under the Italian Fascist regime in several places, for example openly autobiographical in the text ‘The Miracle of San Baudolino’ (at the end of the volume How to Travel with a Salmon) and in various ‘matchbook letters’, but also in literary form in the novels The Foucault Pendulum (where, among other things, the period of the partisan war of 1944-1945 is recounted with concrete situations from the life of the young Eco), The Island of the Last Day and Baudolino (whose protagonists both come from the Alessandria region, one in the Baroque 17th century and the other in the Middle Ages). The first is set in the Baroque 17th century and the second in the medieval 12th century, in which he witnesses, among other things, the founding of the town in 1168) and in particular in his fifth novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which describes Eco's childhood and youth. The experience of 12 to 13-year-old Eco in a small mountain village in southern Piedmont, where his family sought protection from the bombings in 1943–1945, and where he experienced fighting between partisans and fascists in the last year of the war.

In 1948 Eco began studying philosophy and literary history at the University of Turin, where he graduated in 1954 with Luigi Pareyson with a dissertation on aesthetics with Thomas Aquinas. After that, Eco went to the then very young Italian television (RAI) in Milan, where he tried to build a cultural program. In 1956 he published his first book, an extended version of his dissertation entitled Il problema estetico in San Tommaso. Three years later, Eco left television and became a non-fiction writer at the Milan publishing house Bompiani, for which he remained until 1975 (and in which almost all his books have since been published). At the same time, he was active in the Gruppo 63, a group belonging to the Neoavanguardia literary movement. With the 1962 book Opera aperta (German: In 1963 he began his academic career as a lecturer in aesthetics and visual communication at the Polytechnic in Milan, eventually ending it at the University of Florence (the oldest university in Europe). His 1968 book Introduction to Semiotics, published in German in 1973, has since been regarded internationally as a standard work. In 1975 he received a professorship in semiotics with a chair at the University of Bologna. Since 1999 he has been head of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici. In October 2007 he retired from active teaching and was professor emeritus of the University of Bologna from 2008.

Eco received numerous honors and awards of both academia and society, including honorary doctorates from 39 universities worldwide (until 2014) – in Germany from the FU Berlin 1998 – and membership of the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts (1999) as well as the Grand Cross of Merit with Star of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2009).

In his 1980 (German: The first novel, Der Name der Rose (The Name of the Rose), was published in 1982. His 1988 novel Das Foucaultsche Pendel and the following four novels (1994, 2000, 2004 and 2010, p.) have been translated into all world languages. The name Umberto Eco is therefore known to a wider audience mainly because of these literary works, in which he makes extensive use of quotations and montage techniques while enjoying the colourful narrative and exciting plots, which has led to their characterisation as the postmodern novels as a whole. He himself was rather skeptical of the concept of postmodernism and preferred to speak of intertextuality, i.e. of the inner interconnectedness and interwovenness of all literary texts. Very plastically, this thought is expressed in a central place in The Name of the Rose, where the narrator Adson says: “I have always thought that the books speak only of the human or divine things that are outside the books. Now I suddenly found out that the books often talk about other books, yes, that it's sometimes as if they talk to each other. And in the light of this new insight, the library seemed even more sorrowful to me. Was it perhaps the place of a long and secular certainty, an inaudible dialogue between parchment and parchment? So something living, a space full of forces that cannot be tamed by a human spirit, a treasure house full of secrets that have arisen from countless brains and continue to live after the death of their producers? Or do they perpetuate?"Eco named Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce as the two modern writers I loved the most and I was most influenced by.

As a citizen and political author, Eco was also an active and vehement opponent of Silvio Berlusconi. In numerous newspaper and magazine articles, he has strongly criticized his policy. Shortly before the April 2006 election, which Berlusconi then narrowly lost, Eco published his collected political writings again in book form under the title Im Krebsgang: "Hot Wars and Media Populism" (PDF). Spring 2007).

Since 1985, he has regularly written a column in the weekly magazine L'Espresso, entitled La Bustina di Minerva (He was co-founder and editor of the internet magazine Golem l'Indispensabile. In 2002, together with friends and like-minded people (including the architect Gae Aulenti and the writer and Germanist Claudio Magris), he founded the group Liberté e Giustizia, which sees itself as an intellectual opposition to the policy of Silvio Berlusconi.

In 2005, Umberto Eco was voted the second most important intellectual in the world in the English magazine Prospect after Noam Chomsky and ahead of Richard Dawkins. In April 2010, the first biography (life and work) about him appeared.After Eco had already devoted himself in detail to the topic of conspiracy theories in the novel The Foucault Pendel, this is also the central topic in the 2010 novel The Cemetery in Prague. With his fictional narrator Simon Simonini, Eco creates a professional forger, whom he introduces as the main author of the protocols of the Sages of Zion.

After Silvio Berlusconi's Mondadori publishing group acquired the Rizzoli publishing group "RCS Libri" in October 2015 with Bompiani publishing house, where Umberto Eco has previously been published, Eco published under the newly founded publishing house La Nave di Teseo, which was named after Eco in reference to the paradox of the ship of Theseus. The publisher of La Nave di Teseo is former Bompiani director Elisabetta Sgarbi. From 1962 until his death, Eco was married to Renate Ramge, an expert in museum and art didactics born in Frankfurt am Main. They had a son and a daughter.

In February 2016, at the age of 84, he died of pancreatic cancer in his apartment in Milan. Eco found his last resting place in a private family chapel at the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan.His extensive private library was acquired by the Ministry of Cultural Property and Activities after several years of negotiations with the heirs in early 2021. For the more than 30,000 titles of modern works in Bologna, a separate library named after Umberto Eco will be created as part of the university library, in which his study will also be reconstructed. In the 17th and 19th centuries, there were about 1200 titles, 36 incunabula and 380 volumes. The Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense is a collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan, Italy.