page_title: Gert Westphal
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Gert Westphal / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Graves of Thomas Mann and family members; to the right that of Gert Westphal Deutsch: Gräber von Thomas Mann und Familienmitgliedern; rechts das von Gert Westphal
context_page_description: Curt Gerhard Westphal, stage name Gert Westphal, was a German-Swiss actor, audiobook narrator, recitator and director, one of the best-known audiobook narrators and speakers in German, described as "König der Vorleser" and "der Caruso der Vorleser". After his reading of her husband's works, Katia Mann called him "des Dichters oberster Mund". The literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki said he was probably the best reciter of German.
context_section_description: Born in Dresden as the son of a culturally interested factory director, Westphal attended the Realgymnasium in Blasewitz, graduating with the Abitur. He trained in acting with Paul Hoffmann at the Dresdner Staatsschauspielhaus, where he made his stage debut in 1940 in a minor role in Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen. He was then drafted for military service and later became a prisoner of war. In  1946 he moved to Bremen, where he was both a member of the Kammerspiele Bremen and a speaker for Radio Bremen. From 1948, he headed the broadcaster's audio play division. In 1953, he took the same position with Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden where he remained until 1959. He was in contact with authors such as Alfred Andersch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Gottfried Benn, Max Frisch and Carl Zuckmayer. He commissioned new audio plays and collaborated with Max Ophüls, Will Quadflieg, Hans Paetsch, Oskar Werner, Walter Jens and Joachim Fest.
  As a recitator and audiobook narrator, Westphal recorded major works by German authors and also translations of writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Henry James and Thornton Wilder, with a focus on Russian literature by Chinghiz Aitmatov, Fjodor Dostojewski, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Maxim Gorki, Nikolai Leskov, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Tolstoi and Anton Checkov, among others. In 1994, he performed a series of readings of correspondences with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, such as Hofmannsthal and Strauss, and Zelter and Goethe.
  He died in Zürich and was buried in Kilchberg, next to the family grave of Thomas Mann.
caption: Westphal's grave next to that of the Thomas Mann family
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