Christian Wilhelm Schenk (born November 11, 1951 in Brașov, People’s Republic of Romania) is a German physician, poet, essayist, translator, and publisher from the Transylvanian Saxon community.
Christian W. Schenk grew up in a small mining settlement near Brașov and was raised trilingually (German, Hungarian, and Romanian). His father is German, his mother Hungarian.
At the end of the 1950s, he made his first attempts at poetry, which led to his first publication in 1961: a poem in the children’s magazine Luminita (Bucharest) under the guidance of the Romanian poet Tudor Arghezi, who was his mentor from 1959 to 1965. His second mentor from 1964 to 1969 was the Transylvanian poet Vasile Copilu-Cheatră.
He attended elementary school in his hometown from 1958 to 1962 and in Wolkendorf from 1962 to 1966. Schenk attended high school in Zeiden, with interruptions, from 1971 to 1973. In between, he supported himself with odd jobs as a projectionist, weaver, or wage laborer. In 1974, he obtained his Abitur (university entrance qualification).
In 1976, Schenk left Romania and emigrated to Germany. Here, he had to retake the Abitur (university entrance qualification) in Wiehl in the Oberbergisches Land region in order to obtain university entrance qualifications in Germany. From 1977 to 1980, he first completed an apprenticeship as a dental technician in Koblenz and then studied medicine/dentistry at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz from 1980 to 1986. In 1985, he received his doctorate in medicine from the same university with a thesis on “The Situation of Severely Disabled People in Working Life.” From 1986 to 1988, Schenk completed the mandatory years of training for health insurance accreditation in Lünen. Starting in 1988, he opened his own practice in Kastellaun. Today, Schenk lives in Boppard.
In 1986, as editor-in-chief of the quadrilingual magazine “Romanian Convergences,” of which he was editor-in-chief from 1984 to 1986, Schenk protested against the demolition of entire cities and cultural sites under dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, which he described as “urbanization plans.” As a result, he was declared “persona non grata” in Romania, with a lifetime ban from entering the country. He continued to write and translate, but his work was recognized only in the West and among the diaspora. After 1989, he was rehabilitated. He received various awards from the government of the time, including the Presidential Certificate.
Through his memberships in the Association of German Writers, the Romanian Writers’ Association, the Union Mondiale des Écrivains Médecins, the American Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences (ARA), the Romanian Writers’ Association of Physicians, the Academy of Sciences, Literature, and Culture in Bihor, the Hesperus Society, the Balkan Romance Studies Association, and the South-East European Society, Schenk has been striving for decades to deepen East-West cultural relations. The Dionysos Literature and Theater Publishing House (Kastellaun), which he founded, is also dedicated to this task.
For his outstanding contributions to East-West cultural relations and his own work, Schenk was nominated as an honorary citizen of the university city of Cluj-Napoca in 2000, and in 2006 as a “Knight of the Danubian Order” in Galați on the Danube.
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