Walter Schmiele (12 April 1909 inSwinemünde – 21 October 1998 inDarmstadt) was a German writer and translator.
Schmiele grew up inFrankfurt am Main. He studiedGerman literature, philosophy and history at the universities of Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Vienna and Rostock. He earned his Ph.D. in Frankfurt, with his dissertation onTheodor Storm. Among his teachers wereFriedrich Gundolf,Karl Jaspers,Paul Tillich,Karl Mannheim, andErnst Kantorowicz. Still a student, he began his freelance career for many newspapers. Between 1934 and 1941, he contributed more than 80 feature essays to the "Frankfurter Zeitung". He began living in Darmstadt in 1940.[citation needed]
After the Second World War, he worked as a freelance journalist and literary critic for many newspapers and radio stations. He wrote poetry and short stories (published in theReclam-Anthology "Deutsche Erzähler der Gegenwart", ("German Contemporary Storytellers") edited by Willi Fehse, 1960)and in the Penguin "Twentieth-Century German Verse".[1] Schmiele published essays and translated poetry and prose from the English language. His translation ofConfessions of an English Opium-Eater ("Bekenntnisse eines englischen Opiumessers") vonThomas De Quincey, first published in 1947 (Parzeller) was re-issued by Goverts (1962), DTV (1965), Medusa (1982) and Insel (2009).
In the 1950s Walter Schmiele initiated the radio program "Vom Geist der Zeit" (Spirit of Times) for theHessischen Rundfunk[2] and contributed many scripts to the program. In 1951-1953, he was editor of the "Neue literarische Welt". From 1956 to 1962, he was Secretary-General of the GermanP.E.N.-Centre, a position in which he organized the 1959 International P.E.N. Congress held in Frankfurt. His 1961 publishedMonography onHenry Miller (rororo) was regularly re-issued since then and was translated in various languages (among others in French, Japanese and Dutch). In 1990, Schmiele edited a collection of texts byKasimir Edschmid in the "Darmstädter Schriften" series ("Kasimir Edschmid, Essay – Rede – Feuilleton").
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