Leonore Mau (1916-2013) and Hubert Fichte (1935-1986) first met in 1955 and lived together for more than 20 years. Almost from the very beginning, the intense personal relationship between them found expression in a complex and fruitful artistic collaboration. The two traveled to Brazil in 1969 and in following years explored the African American religions in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. Mau & Fichte collaborated on short films and books, she photographing and him writing. Fichte died of an AIDS-related illness in 1986.
Hubert Fichte
Self-identified as half-Jewish, illegitimate, and bisexual, the German writer Hubert Fichte (1935-1986) lived in Hamburg for most of his life. After spending part of the war in a Catholic orphanage, he later worked as a child actor on the Hamburg stage, an apprentice agronomist, a shepherd in Provence, and a counselor at a home for juvenile delinquents in Sweden, where his first book of short stories is set (Aufbruch nach Turku, 1963).
He turned to writing full time in his late twenties. His first novel, Das Waisenhaus (1965) (translated as The Orphanage by Martin Chalmers), was a critical success; his second, Die Palette (1968) was a succès de scandale and a bestseller. While continuing to publish novels, plays, essays, and journalism, Fichte spent the remainder of his life exploring syncretic religious practices among peoples of African descent in the New World (e.g., santería, voudun, candomblé, etc.). This "poetic ethnography," as he called it, resulted in more than a half dozen volumes (none translated into English): Xango, Petersilie, Lazarus und die Waschmaschine, Explosion, Das Haus der Mina in São Luiz de Maranhão, and the novel from which this excerpt ("Research report", see link) is taken, Forschungsbericht, which is also one of the high points of his posthumously published projected nineteen-volume roman-fleuve, Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (A History of Sensitivity).
'Hubert Fichte – Love and Ethnology' project
By translating Fichtes novels into the languages of the places that Hubert Fichte traveled with his life companion Leonore Mau, the current project "Hubert Fichte – Love and Ethnology" in 2017 attempts to stimulate reception of his work there for the first time. The project was conceived by Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke in cooperation with other curators. It will launch in 2017 with exhibitions in the art space Lumiar Cité in Lisbon (September-October; co-curator: Jürgen Bock), at the MAM – Museum of Modern Art in Salvador de Bahia (October–November) and at the Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro (November–December; co-curators: Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz and Amilcar Packer). In September 2017 Fichte's novel about Mau's and his first travel together and their first stay in Lisbon and Sesimbra in the times of dictatorship 1964 will appear in Portuguese under the title "Um amor feliz".
Sources:
https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2017/hubert_fichte/hubert_fichte_start.php
http://counterculturalbooks.wikia.com/wiki/Leonore_Mau
http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/german/from-research-report-by-hubert-fichte
Christian Hauck-HahmannZum Original