Norris von Schirach

Norris Benedikt von Schirach (* 1963 in Munich) pseudonym Arthur Isarin, is a German businessman und writer, who worked for several years as a commodities expert and copper specialist in Russia and elsewhere.

Life

Norris Benedikt von Schirach was born in Munich in 1963. By his own admission, he attended seven or „more” boarding schools. After training in Munich, he initially worked for insurance companies in London and New York before studying administrative sciences at the University of Konstanz and then working in Russia, Kazakhstan and Australia. He published his first novel Pale Heroes (Blasse Helden) in spring 2018 with Knaus Verlag (Germany) under the pseudonym Arthur Isarin so that his well-known surname would not overshadow the work and readers as well as critics would receive it without bias; his authorship was only revealed six months after publication. In his literary work he processed his experiences of the Yeltsin-years in Moscow, which were characterized by “privatization and the accompanying strengthening of the oligarchs as well as the slipping of large parts of the population below the poverty line” and which made Vladimir Putin’s system possible in the first place. "I wanted to capture the mood of those years”, Norris von Schirach said in an interview with journalist Kerstin Holm. Viktor Yerofeyev judged Pale Heroes: „Anyone who wants to understand Russia today should read Norris von Schirach - a bold literary adventure.” New Books in German Fiction (US Jury Pick) mentions his „stark, moving and strangely beautiful prose". Pale Heroes is the first volume of a planned trilogy and was on the SWR-best list for June for 2018.

In 2022, the novel Looting Time (Beutezeit), published by Penguin (Germany), followed. It is about a commodities trader who is tasked with building a steel company in post-Soviet Kazakhstan after „President Nazarbayev [...] transferred the bankruptcy assets of the Soviets into a kind of personal feudal system". While Nicole Köster mentioned Looting Time „reads in part like James Bond on Dostoyevsky“, Sigrid Löffler wrote that „it is above all this subtle criticism of the West that makes Norris von Schirach's Looting Time worth reading.”

His younger brother is the well-known lawyer and author Ferdinand von Schirach (* 1964); his grandfather Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) was Reich Youth Leader of the NSDAP during the National Socialist era.

Today Norris von Schirach lives in seclusion in the Romanian Carpathians and has a son.

Quote

Family is always destiny, and you have to accept such a destiny; there is, of course, a lifelong confrontation with this person (meaning his grandfather Baldur von Schirach).

— Norris von Schirach, [1]

Works

• Pale Heroes (Blasse Helden), München: Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 2018-03-12, p. 320 ISBN 978-442-31115-6
• Looting Time (Beutezeit). Roman. Penguin, München 2022, ISBN 978-3-328-60125-8.

Weblinks

• Arthur Isarin at perlentaucher.de – das Kulturmagazin (in German)
• Norris von Schirach – randomhouse.de
• Norris von Schirach »Beutezeit« – Geistesblüten
• 9th international literature festival Odesa: Norris von Schirach in conversation with Gabriel Horatiu Decuble. 25.2.2024
• Korrupt in Kasachstan von Sigrid Löffler - DLF Kultur. 19.11.2022