Mario Szenessy grew up in the Vojvodina in a multiethnic, multilingual environment. In 1942 his family moved to Szeged, Hungary where he studied German and Slavic languages and discovered the writings of Kafka and Thomas Mann. He became a school teacher and also taught Russian at the Medical Academy,. Based on his writings about Thomas Mann he received a grant by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and thus came to the University of Tübingen in 1963, where he worked on Mann's novella Die Betrogene. Later, he moved to Berlin. Encouraged by Inge and Walter Jens, Szenessy started to write in German and published his first book in 1967, Verwandlungskünste.Marcel Reich-Ranicki wrote: He who is not a German writes a much better German than almost all who publish books in Germany... bitter, sarcastic, and full of temperament, sharp, springy and lapidary. When Szenessy’s books failed to gain a wider audience, he began to write critiques and translations, and eventually decided to become qualified as a librarian. In 1971, Szenessy received the Hermann-Hesse-Preis for his novel Lauter falsche Pässe oder Die Erinnerungen des Roman Skorzeny. Mario Szenessy died from a bronchial carcinoma in Pinneberg in 1976.
Work
Szenessy wrote in the epic tradition of Thomas Mann, his literary role model, and his first book received highly favorable critiques. Thus the Süddeutsche Zeitung called him a new, wonderful narrator. When, however, he made literary concessions to gain a greater audience, critics bemoaned this development. Yet, remarkable remains Szenessy’s art to so completely enter into the German language that it had become finally his home. He always tried to popularize East-European literature in Germany; especially the Hungarian authors György Konrád and Tibor Déry he made more familiar with translations as well as a monograph. In his novel Lauter falsche Pässe, Szenessy stylized the image of the typical entertainment novel by treating the genre in a sarcastic fashion, thus transferring it into a work of art. In the book the author receives a manuscript that represents an autobiography of Roman Skorzeny. Skorzeny recalls how after falsifying stamps, he proceeds to manufacture the accompanying letters, and then the related biographies. The text demonstrates the patterns of a fascinating narration whereby the first name of the fictitious author indicates that in this book the subject is the novelper se. Presented are the political thriller, the espionage and criminal novel, the sailors’ yarn and Anglo romantic accounts of mail coach robberies. The introduction is a parody of the classical Bildungsroman and cites existing travesty in literature. The genre of the trivial novel presents itself as a novel in all its forms as if to prove that the novel is just not a lower art form.
