THE GERMAN NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER Max von der Grün was born in Bayreuth on May 25, 1926. There was nothing in his background or education to indicate a future literary career. The son of simple factory workers, he first attended grade school and then a commercial secondary school, before becoming a mercantile trade apprentice. During the Third Reich his father, a religious fundamentalist and conscientious objector, was taken to the Dachau concentration camp. Von der Grün himself was drafted, taken prisoner in Normandy and from there to a POW camp in the American South. In 1948 he returned to Germany, worked as a bricklayer and then, after resettling in the Ruhr, from 1951 to 1963 in the coal mines. Together with Fritz Hüser, director of the Dortmund Municipal Library, he founded the “Dortmunder Gruppe 61 für künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit der industriellen Arbeitswelt.” Since 1963 he has lived in Dortmund as a freelance writer.

Although Max von der Grün's fiction is set almost exclusively in the milieu of industrial workers, most particularly among the coal miners of the Ruhr, he rejects the label of a “workers’ writer.” His prime aim, he stresses, is to portray — as concretely as possible — human problems and conflicts, as they arise, to be sure, within the modern industrial system. His social criticism, however, is bound by neither political nor literary ideology. In subjecting the realities of the industrial world to critical examination, he is concerned above all with justice and human dignity. In his first novel, Männer in zweifacher Nacht (1962), he depicted the helplessness of the miners to cope with their political and social oppression. His next novel, Irrlicht und Feuer (1963), is set among the same Ruhr miners, but — as Franz Schonauer has emphasized — it more aggressively and directly attacks those in the industrial hierarchy who are responsible for such oppression. The political uproar occasioned by this novel within the mining industry gained widespread attention. Also, it cost the author his job and led him to devote himself primarily to writing.

Von der Grün's most successful novel to date has been Stellenweise Glatteis, which appeared in 1973.