Joseph von Westphalen

Joseph Graf von Westphalen was born on 26 June 1945 in Schwandorf, in the Upper Palatinate region of Bavaria, seven weeks after the end of the Second World War. His father had been killed in the war. He liked to tell outsiders that he came from "Schwandorf near Wackersdorf", the site of a fiercely contested nuclear reprocessing plant project.

He belonged to the old noble Westphalen family, whose long line also includes Jenny von Westphalen, the wife of Karl Marx. He grew up in Munich and after finishing school studied literature and art history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1966. In 1978 he received his doctorate in German studies with a dissertation on the figure of the failing poet, supervised by Professor Werner Vordtriede.

From 1979 to 1981 Westphalen worked for the German collecting society for authors, VG Wort, and then became an editor at the cultural magazine Westermanns Monatshefte. From 1987 he lived in Munich as a freelance writer.

He began as a journalist writing polemical glosses that he himself called "Entrüstungen", and quickly became known as a sharp tongued opponent of every kind of fashionable trend. His essay collections carried deliberately provocative titles, among them Warum ich Monarchist geworden bin (1985), Warum ich trotzdem Seitensprünge mache (1987) and Warum ich Terrorist geworden bin (1989). In 1990 he published Von deutscher Bulimie, which he subtitled a futile polemic against German unity.

His critique continued in his fiction, where the character Harry von Duckwitz, a disaffected aristocrat in the diplomatic service, embodied the author's hedonistic side. The Duckwitz books began with Im diplomatischen Dienst (1991) and continued with titles such as Das schöne Leben (1993) and Die bösen Frauen (1996). Other works included Trotzdem herzliche Grüße (1988), a correspondence with Monika Maron, the novel Die Memoiren meiner Frau (2006) and the story collection Aus dem Leben eines Lohnschreibers (2009).

Under the pseudonym David Elphinstone he published Sinecure in 1989; in 2008 a reprint was turned into an art installation at a manor house near Tribsees in Mecklenburg. In the late 1990s he was one of the first German writers to use multimedia and the internet to give readers a view into his workshop, with the CD-ROM Mein Kosmos (1996). For many years, until June 2014, he wrote more than three hundred weekly columns titled Der Flaneur for the Munich Abendzeitung.

Westphalen lived in Munich for most of his life and was closely identified with the city's literary and cultural scene. He was married and had two children. He was a member of PEN Centre Germany from 1992.

Joseph von Westphalen died on 29 October 2026, aged 81. The cause of death was not made public. On 30 October the Süddeutsche Zeitung published an obituary by Willi Winkler under the title "Ein freier Geist" (A free spirit), remembering him as an anarchistic count and a great enthusiast for revolutions.

Westphalen is remembered as one of the most distinctive satirists of postwar German literature, a writer who combined aristocratic ancestry with an anarchic, anti authoritarian temperament. His Duckwitz novels and his columns gave readers a witty, elegant and often furious commentary on German life from the 1980s to the 2010s. In 1992 he received the Ernst Hoferichter Prize, a Munich award for writers who combine originality with humour.