No other writer was as aware of the significance of images for a life as Arno Schmidt: "My life?! a tray full of sparkling snapshots," he wrote in his novel "From the Life of a Faun." What could be more fitting than to trace Arno Schmidt's life with a pictorial biography that mosaic-like assembles the panorama of a distinctive writer's existence? Introductory texts by Bernd Rauschenbach provide an overview of the stages of Schmidt's life - childhood in Hamburg, youth in Silesia, wartime and post-war misery, the repeated changes of residence, until Arno Schmidt finds the "landscape suited to him" in Bargfeld in the Lüneburg Heath. For this first comprehensive pictorial biography of Arno Schmidt, the editor Fanny Esterházy researched in archives and uncovered unknown and astonishing material: photos, drawings.