One of a kind: Literary heroes and their gangs – Authorial images in literary biopics

Abstract

Literary biopics tell stories of how to become an author or an authoress. Literary history as told by biographical pictures since the beginning of the 20th century depends on specific social and aesthetical contexts. The literary genius, who is in special militaristic narratives the head of an intellectual gang, rises in German history even before World War I and again in the mid-war era. This chapter discusses the later fascist version of Friedrich Schiller’s life in Herbert Maisch’s Triumph eines Genies (1940), which deals with the psychosocial dynamics of gang building and with biopics appearing after World War II, which develop various deviant author figures with obvious problems in their life and work, including homosocial desire, mental illness and addiction. In these movies, male homosocial bonding places the women writer as ‘the other’ outside the literary gang.