Hanna Johansen 1990

Summary

BORN IN BREMEN, WEST GERMANY, Hanna Johansen has lived in Kilchberg near the Swiss city of Zurich for over twenty years. She began her career as a writer relatively recently; her first work was published in 1978. For Johansen, writing is a way to process experiences. When she writes, she does not think of the overall view which she wants to convey, but rather she concentrates on getting down on paper whatever comes to her, without restrictions. The way in which Johansen goes about writing varies from one work to the next. Thus her first book, Die stehende Uhr, almost wrote itself, whereas many of her later works involved extensive research and a good deal of editing. Through this almost inadvertent experimentation with various approaches to writing, Johansen has learned that one does not have to feel secure in the way one does something in order to get it done.

Johansen began her career as an author in 1977 by writing a few pages every afternoon in the house of a friend until it was time to pick up her son Benjamin from school. She had no plans to write a novel, she says, and was somewhat surprised when she eventually found herself with a manuscript in her hands. It was accepted immediately by a German publisher. When one considers Johansen's background it is easy to understand her surprise upon the publication of Die stehende Uhr.

After her graduation from secondary school, she studied at the universities of Marburg and Göttingen with plans to become a school teacher. She never felt fully comfortable with her studies, however, and eventually broke off her schooling to get married. After traveling to the United States and spending some time in Geneva, she settled down with her husband outside of Zurich.

To the question why she began to write, Hanna Johansen has no set answer. Shortly after her marriage in 1967, she made a project of translating the work of several American authors into German. She became interested in children's literature in the early 1970s, writing and telling stories for her two small sons. It was not until 1977, however, that Johansen devoted a significant amount of time to writing. At this early stage, writing was for her a type of outlet, a way of expressing thoughts that could not be expressed in spoken words.