Aut(h)or
Dr. Joachim Mathieu, born in 1971 in Ansbach, grew up in the Bavarian region of Central Franconia. After graduating from school in Dinkelsbühl (in 1990), he did his community service (instead of mandatory service in the German army) at the Ansbach district hospital. This institution used to be referred to by the onomatopoetic name of “HuPflA” in German. However, this term (even though Germans are reminded of the verb for hopping around) is not meant to refer to patients at the psychiatric institution who move about a bit too energetically. No, rather the term “HuPflA” stands for “Heil- und Pflegeanstalt” (= psychiatric and nursing home). This institution, however, was not only the place where the author did his community service, but also where his great-grandfather Karl Spönnemann had worked as a locksmith between 1928 and 1947. Therefore, in addition to other archived materials and old documents, there was also information about his own family history to be found in this institution. Researching into the traces of the as of yet totally unknown great-great-grandfather had been triggered by some old files preserved in the family, and it eventually led to the publication of the German version of the book Die großen Spuren des Sigmund Klein in 2018, which has now been translated into English as Sigmund Klein - more than a little affair.
In the 27 years between his community service and starting to reasearch for his book in 2017, the author had first studied English and History; mainly in Eichstätt, in between in Durham, England. After the first state examination (for prospective grammar school teachers in Bavaria), he spent a year as a teaching assistant in Atlanta (at Emory University), earned his doctorate in English literature (with a dissertation on the Victorian writer Edward Bulwer Lytton, who unfortunately is not nearly as popular today as he was during his lifetime), and he finally took up the honourable position of a grammar school teacher in the service of the Bavarian state. Since 2002 he has been working at the Gabrieli-Gymnasium (= grammar school) in Eichstätt, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.
A far less serious book project from the pen/keyboard of the same author is the short story collection Meschugge in Mogadishu. This book was published in 2021 under the pseudonym Moshe Mandelbaum (as well as under 25 other pseudonyms from Alonso Alvarez to Lilith Lytton and Yvonne Yildirim to Zoltan Zaromiretsch). So far, unfortunately, the stories are only available in German but it must be feared that at some point an English version will also be published! If you want to, you can learn a bit more about it here.
A far less serious book project from the pen/keyboard of the same author is the short story collection Meschugge in Mogadishu. This book was published in 2021 under the pseudonym Moshe Mandelbaum (as well as under 25 other pseudonyms from Alonso Alvarez to Lilith Lytton and Yvonne Yildirim to Zoltan Zaromiretsch). So far, unfortunately, the stories are only available in German but it must be feared that at some point an English version will also be published! If you want to, you can learn a bit more about it here.