Hubert Fichte
A German writer whose accounts of sexuality and religion crossed the boundaries of fiction and ethnography.
Hubert Fichte was born in Perleberg in 1935. He grew up mainly in Hamburg and spent part of the Nazi period in a Bavarian orphanage. After the war he worked as a child actor and later as a farmworker and shepherd before establishing himself as a writer.
“Die Palette” (1968), centred on a Hamburg bar and its outsiders, brought him a wide readership. His autobiographical writing approached desire between men with a directness unusual in post-war German literature, while questioning the categories through which respectable society defined its margins.
For much of his adult life Fichte shared a home and travelled with the photographer Leonore Mau. Their work on Afro-American religions in Brazil, Haiti and West Africa brought interviews, ritual, literary experiment and photography into close contact. Mau’s images were a substantial contribution to their shared projects.
Fichte’s unfinished “Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit” began appearing after his death, extending his exploration of memory, sexuality and ways of knowing other lives. He died of an AIDS-related illness in Hamburg in 1986, shortly before his fifty-first birthday.