Hans Keilson (1909–2011)

Hans Keilson, born to a Jewish family in Bad Freienwalde, near Berlin, Germany, was educated as a physician. He published his first novel, Life Goes On, at age 23. After the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933, he was prohibited from practicing medicine and his book was banned. He worked for a while as a gym instructor in Jewish private schools. In 1936, he fled to The Netherlands with his future wife, Gertrud Manz. His parents were deported to Auschwitz, where they both died. In Holland, Dr. Keilson began a new novel, The Death of the Adversary, but put aside the manuscript and buried it in his garden after the German Occupation of the country in 1940. In 1941, he went into hiding with a Dutch couple, Leo and Suus Rientsma, under a false identity. Gertrud, who was not Jewish and was pregnant, lived nearby. During this time, Dr. Keilson worked with the Dutch Resistance, taking care of Jewish children living with foster parents after being separated from their biological families. After the war, he was reunited with Gertrud and his daughter, and the couple were able to marry. He went on to practice as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, specializing in the care of children traumatized by the war. He wrote Sequential Traumatisation in Children (1979), a groundbreaking and widely-translated study. In 1970, following the death of his first wife, Dr. Keilson remarried to Marita Lauritz, a literary critic 25 years his junior, with whom he had another daughter. He published poetry and several more novels, receiving warm reviews but little acclaim. The Death of the Adversary, finally published in German in 1959, was a bestseller in English in 1962, but he remained in obscurity. Then, when Dr. Keilson was nearly 100 years old, Francine Prose reviewed two of his novels in The New York Times and called him "one of the world's very greatest writers." He became an international media sensation and The Death of the Adversary again became a bestseller. His diary from the year 1944, discovered among his papers after his death, was published in 2017 and has been called "an incomparable spiritual X-ray of the mind and heart behind the art."