The Modern Novel

Biography

Hans Scherfig was born in 1905. His father was the director of a large publishing house. He attended the prestigious Metropolitanskole and his experiences there were the basis for his novel Det forsømte forår (Stolen Spring) . He attended the University of Copenhagen but jumped from course to course and failed to graduate. He started his career as a painter. On a trip to the United States, he was converted to a strong left-wing outlook, both because of contact with Marxists and because of the misery he saw caused by the Depression. He also met his future wife, the Austrian painter, Elisabeth Karlinsky. On their return to Denmark, they struggled, living on the small amount of money they made from their painting. However, Scherfig contracted a disease that left him almost blind so he switched to writing from painting and very soon had a successful career as a writer.

During the war he was imprisoned for his Marxist views and only his eye disease saved him from a worse fate. He spent much of the war in hiding. After the war he mainly wrote travelogues and essays on socialist issues. As well as writing novels, he was also an amateur zoologist and had planned a scholarly work on dragonflies in Denmark. He died in 1979. Much of his fiction writing is satirical and castigates the bourgeoisie and mocks what he considers to be stupid behaviour. He uses the detective novel form to make his point – and one of the points is that the bourgeois are the real criminals.

Other links

Hans Scherfig
Hans Scherfig
Hans Scherfig
Hans Scherfig
Hans Scherfig (in Danish)
Scherfig, Hans (in Danish)