Vita
Hellmut G. Haasis was born on 07.01.1942 in Mühlacker. He studied Protestant theology, history, sociology and politics and now lives as a freelance author, historical excavator, publicist and mini-publisher in Reutlingen/Swabia.
The author is not interested in emperors and kings, even the rulers at the top do not concern him much. Unless they are such gruesome frontier figures as Hitler and Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich, whom he wishes a capable partisan or two. His oeuvre includes works in which he reconstructs grassroots democratic efforts from often buried sources. Or he was concerned with the fate of persons who came into fundamental opposition to the rulers and have not lost their significance even today. With "Traces of the Defeated" or "Give Freedom Wings", he set a literary monument to the protagonists of the freedom struggles from below. His most widely received work to date is devoted to the life and motives of the Hitler assassin Georg Elser, who detonated a bomb in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller on 9 November 1939, missing Hitler and his entire leadership clique by a tragic 13 minutes. Otherwise, the Second World War would soon have come to a halt, the Holocaust would not have taken place, the disabled and sick would not have been gassed, the Russian and Western armies would not have had to meet at the Elbe in 1945.
In 1990 Haasis, who also publishes texts in Swabian dialect, was awarded the Thaddäus Troll Prize for his dialect novel "Em Chrischdian sei Leich". In 1995, he received the ARD's CIVIS Media Prize for the radio play "Joseph Süß". In 1999 he received the Schubart Prize of the city of Aalen for his biography "Joseph Süß Oppenheimer". In 2013, he was presented with the Ludwig Uhland Prize in Ludwigsburg for his life's work. He experienced a political culmination of his research into Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (1738), who was hanged by the Stuttgart secret tribunal, when the Baden-Württemberg state parliament rehabilitated Joseph Süß as a victim of justice in 2013. A first act of its kind by a parliament.
Haasis also plays and tells stories as the Swabian fairy tale clown Druiknui for children between the ages of 4 and 10. Finally, he founded the Freidenker-Gruppe Reutlingen, which strives for a strict separation of church and state and opposes the return to much religion and churchiness that has become fashionable. An association of agnostics and atheists.