The writer Henning Boëtius has died. This was announced by his publisher btb in Munich. Boëtius was a prolific author of biographical novels such as JMR Lenz, Clemens Brentano and Arthur Rimbaud. His detective novels about the inspector Piet Hieronymus and his “naive child’s view of the situation” also found many readers. A trilogy of autobiographically grounded books began with his most successful book, Phoenix Rising from the Ashes in 2000, in which he worked on the life story of his father, who was on board the Zeppelin in May 1937 Hindenburg exploded and the accident survived.
Most recently, a novel about Heinrich Heine’s last years was published in 2020 under the title “The White Abyss”. In a few days his last Piet Hieronymus thriller “The Chinese Room” will be publishedhttps://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.” For him, freedom, in life as well as in art, was an absolute necessity; he always had to remained faithful, never wanted to betray himself and, despite all resistance and setbacks, never gave up and kept reinventing himself,” writes Boëtius’ longtime publisher Georg Reuchlein in memory of his author. Henning Boëtius was 82 years old.