Robert Musil – Literatur und Politik

Transcription

Klaus Amann
Robert Musil – Literatur und Politik
(Robert Musil – Literature and Politics)
rororo, rowohlts enzyklopädie (Rowohlt Verlag), March 2007, 316 pp. ISBN: 978 3 499 55685 2
A Man With Undoubted Qualities
Robert Musil’s status as a major European writer is well
established: endorsements by the likes of Milan Kundera
and J.M. Coetzee, two English translations of Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), as well as
of his short fiction, his play Die Schwärmer, the best-known
of his essays and speeches and a substantial selection from
his notes and diaries. What is new in Klaus Amann’s book is
a coherent presentation of a group of texts that remained
unpublished in his subject’s lifetime and the analysis he
provides of Musil’s situation and activities in the years
between the publication of the first two volumes of Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften in 1930-32 and his death in 1942.
The main focus of the book is on Musil’s responses to
political developments following the consolidation of the
National Socialist regime in Germany in 1933. Having lived
in Berlin since November 1931, he had first-hand experience
of the impact of National Socialism, and when he returned
to Vienna in May 1933 he was also manifestly appalled
by the reactionary developments that were taking place
in Austria. But he faced particular difficulties when trying
to issue a clear public declaration of his own position in
© Rowohlt Verlag
Klaus Amann
is Professor of History and the Theory of
Literary Life and Director of the Robert
Musil Institute for Literary Research at
the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.
He has written widely on Austrian
writers from Adalbert Stifter to Peter
Handke, Robert Musil to Christine
Lavant, Franz Grillparzer to Thomas
Bernhard and sits on the jury of several
notable literary prizes.
22 non-Fiction
Robert Musil (1880 – 1942)
is arguably best remembered for his
modernist masterpiece The Man
Without Qualities. Other works
included the novella Die Verwirrungen
des Zöglings Törless (The Confusions
of Young Törless) and the short stories
Drei Frauen (published with two other
stories in English in a volume called
Five Women). A beautiful edition of
response. Amann’s analysis points to the on-going financial
hardship he suffered, to the pressure his publisher (Rowohlt)
brought to bear upon him to dissociate himself from open
opposition to National Socialism in its early stages, but
also to problems with particular publishing outlets and
to bureaucratic machinations in Austria.
Most clearly brought out are Musil’s abhorrence for the
attempts of politicians and movements, whatever their
ideological orientation, to treat literary writing as an
instrument of their political goals, and his perception of the
need for the writer to maintain intellectual independence.
Also striking is the parallel he drew between the mass
euphoria attending the outbreak of war in 1914 and the
mood of 1933. It is in this context that the continuity in
Musil’s thinking about the underlying unity of human nature
and its capacity for extremes of behaviour becomes apparent.
Amann’s book has rightly been received in Germany as
an important contribution to Musil scholarship. It deserves
the same welcome here.
his diaries was published in English in
1998 by Basic Books. Also available in
English are a collection of his essays
entitled Precision and Soul and
another entitled Posthumous Papers
of a Living Author.
Application for assistance with
translation costs – Austria
Translation rights available from:
Rowohlt Verlag GmbH
Hamburger Strasse 17
21465 Reinbek, Germany
Tel: +49 40 72 72-257
Email: [email protected]
Contact: Carolin Kettmann
www.rowohlt.de
Rowohlt Verlag
was founded by Ernst Rowohlt in 1908.
This publishing house with its various
divisions is part of the Holtzbrinck
group. Rowohlt publishes literary
fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.
Authors include Wolfgang Borchert,
Joachim Fest, Elfriede Jelinek, Daniel
Kehlmann, Imre Kertész, Ildikó von
Kürthy, Klaus and Erika Mann, Peter
Schneider, Martin Walser and many
others. This year Rowohlt celebrates its
100th anniversary.
‘The best introduction to Musil’s way
of thinking.’ – Die Zeit
‘Klaus Amann’s brilliant study…dispels
the fairy-tale of the “unpolitical
author”.’ – Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Lukas Bärfuss
Hundert Tage
(One Hundred Days)
Wallstein Verlag, March 2008, 198 pp. ISBN-13: 978 3 8353 0271 6
Stark, merciless, upfront – a novel that demands to be read
Hundert Tage is set in Rwanda in the years leading up to
and during the Rwandan civil war in 1994 and the genocidal
massacre of between 500,000 Tutsis (‘the tall people’) by
the ruling Hutus (‘the short people’). It is narrated by the
main character, David Hohl, a Swiss citizen sent to Rwanda
on his first posting as an official of the Swiss Agency for
Development and Cooperation, generally referred to simply
as ‘the Agency’. A key event that will trigger his future
reactions happens at the airport in Brussels when a young
black woman in front of him in the queue is called negro
by a Belgian official. He protests, is hauled off by security
guards and misses his plane. But he remembers the
young woman.
As he settles down to his work in Kigali, the capital of
Rwanda, he finds that it is mainly clerical. All the Agency’s
aid and efforts are directed into the channels of the local
political structures and are therefore helping to maintain a
dictatorial racist power. Personal aid and helpfulness, such
as David would like to give, is regarded as sentimentality.
Soon after his arrival David meets the girl from the airport
again. Her name is Agathe, and she works as a volunteer in
the hospital where David is taken when, thanks to another
lapse into ‘sentimentality’, he has been crushed while
attending a meeting given by the Pope. The couple start
an affair, the details of which are described in the crudest
terms. The point of this is not pornographic. It is simply to
make clear that for Agathe sex is purely functional, has no
connection with emotions, is not an expression of love. It
will later occur to David that the genocidal troops regard
killing in the same way. It has no moral dimension for them.
When the rebel army approaches Kigali the Europeans are
evacuated but David stays behind. He feels revulsion that
the aid workers, for all their declarations that they are there
to help the Africans, can simply cut and run.
This is an extremely powerful novel, a devastating
denunciation of the inadequacies of the Western powers
through the actions of their agencies. As such, it demands
to be read.
© Wallstein Verlag
Long-listed for the German Book Prize.
‘What an incredible book! A highly
political novel that doesn’t serve up
ready-made verdicts of guilt. Deeply
unsettling.’ – Die Welt
‘Bärfuss stares deep into the heart
of darkness. A major, stirring novel.’
– Tages-Anzeiger
Lukas Bärfuss,
born in Thun, Switzerland, in 1971, is
one of the most successful dramatists
to emerge in recent years and his plays
are staged all over the world. Bärfuss
was voted playwright of the year in
2005 in a poll of reviewers featured
by the magazine Theater heute.
Amongst many other awards is the
important Mühlheim Dramatist Prize.
Most recently he received the Anna
Seghers Prize, an international prize
for emerging authors. He lives with
his wife and two children in Zurich.
Translations of literary works
include:
The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents
(Nick Hearn Books, UK); other works
sold to Bulgaria: (Pygmalion Press);
France (L’Arche Editeur); Poland
(Ksiergarnia Akademicka).
Translations and performances of
dramatic works also in:
The Czech Republic, Ecuador, Finland,
Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxemburg,
Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia,
all the Scandinavian countries, Slovenia
and Turkey.
Previous works include:
Meierbergs Tod – Die sexuellen
Neurosen der Eltern – Der Bus (2005);
Alices Reise in die Schweiz – Die
Probe – Amygdala (2007).
Both Wallstein.
translation costs – Switzerland
Translation rights to Hundert
Tage already sold to:
France (L’Arche Editeur); Italy (Einaudi);
Sweden (Norstedts); Romania
(Humanitas).
Wallstein Verlag GmbH, Geiststraße 11,
37073 Göttingen, Germany
Tel: +49 551 54898-24
[email protected]
Contact: Sabine Felsberg
www.wallstein-verlag.de
Wallstein Verlag was founded as
a desktop publishing company but
by 1988 had grown into a full-scale
book publisher. The firm publishes
about 130 titles a year, ranging from
contemporary literature to history and
cultural studies. Its authors include
Ruth Kluger, Gottfried Benn, Golo
Mann, Fred Wander, Gregor Sander
and Ulf Erdmann Ziegler.
Fiction Anja Jardine
Werner Bräunig
Als der Mond vom Himmel fiel
Gewöhnliche Leute
Kein & Aber, 304 pp. ISBN 978-3-0369-5518-6
Aufbau-Verlag, March 2008, 275 pp. ISBN: 978-3-351-03230-2
Stories that linger – a welcome
newcomer
Ordinary folk in extraordinary times
(When the Moon Fell From the Skies)
The eleven stories collected in this volume are extremely
heterogeneous in terms of length, setting and types of character,
but share an almost obsessive concern with the smallest details
of daily life – details which, while apparently banal, almost always
hold the secret strength of changing their characters’ lives.
Such, for example, is the case with Judith, looking back to her
last year at school, with the forty-something journalist Katrin,
travelling the world in search of interesting stories yet constantly
yearning for somebody to miss her at home, or with the elderly
overseer of a New Zealand apple plantation besotted with his
youngest and best worker.
The volume becomes progressively more interesting and gripping,
each story adding meaning to those that follow. Two crown the rest
– one set in war-ravaged Bosnia, the other describing the suicide
attempt of a German teenager, who tragically discovers the beauty
of life when it is too late. Together they allow the reader to indulge
in philosophical speculations or just plunge into an entertaining,
intelligent and enriching reading experience as he or she may
prefer. Highly recommended.
(Common People)
When Aufbau-Verlag published Werner Bräunig’s novel Rummelplatz
in 2007 (See NBG – Autumn 2007) it was received, by critics and
readers alike, as one of the literary sensations of the past few
decades. Written in the early 1960s, it had been banned from
publication by the authorities in the GDR, where Bräunig lived, and
where he died in 1976 at the early age of forty-two, having never
lived to see it in print. He was not a prolific writer, but in 1969 the
GDR permitted publication of a collection of short stories under the
title of Gewöhnliche Leute, to which several more have now been
added in this new edition, like its predecessor impeccably edited
by Angela Drescher.
In comparison with Rummelplatz, this a restrained book. In the
society it depicts there is no sense of community, no joy of collective
labour and achievement. ‘Is it that we all want something, but what
comes out is something none of us wanted?’ Bräunig asks. At the
very least these stories are a varied, intelligent, atmospheric and
highly readable panorama of life in the first two decades of the
GDR. But, more than that, they fulfill Bräunig’s stated aim, to write
about ‘the extraordinary in everyday lives’.
Both Rummelplatz and these stories are deserving of a new lease
of life on our shores.
Anja Jardine was born in 1967 near
Hamburg. After gaining a degree
in economics and graduating from
journalism school she worked as a
film-maker on television, then as an
editor with Die Zeit Magazin and
Spiegel reporter. Since 2005 she has
been based in Zurich where she works
on the journal Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Folio. This is her first work of fiction.
Kein & Aber was founded in 1997
and swiftly established itself on the
scene with its programme of fiction
and audio books. Now regarded as one
of the leading independent publishers,
it publishes around forty titles a year
and focuses on fiction, satire, children’s
books and audio books.
‘Spectacularly beautiful short stories.’
– Focus
‘A collection of short stories to read
and read again. ‘ – Brigitte
© Billhardt/Camera Work
© Anita Affentranger
Kein & Aber AG
Tel: 41 44 297 12 78
Contact: Susanne von Ledebur
www.keinundaber.ch
Aufbau Media GmbH
Tel: + 49 30 25 76 23 17
Email: [email protected];
[email protected]
Contact: Carolina Lehmkuhl
or Britta Marckwardt
www.aufbau-verlag.de www.
aufbaumedia.de
Werner Bräunig born in Chemnitz
in 1934, was regarded as the great
hope of GDR literature – until an
extract from his novel and masterpiece
Rummelplatz (‘Fairground’) met with
a ferocious opposition that sealed its
fate. He died in Halle in 1976.
translation costs – Germany
The original Aufbau Verlag was
founded in 1945 and became the
leading cultural and literary publishing
house in East Germany. For more
information contact the editor.
‘Imperceptibly Bräunig turns a snapshot
into a character sketch, a character
sketch into a milieu sketch and a milieu
sketch into a critique of society.’
– Die Zeit
Short Stories 45
Karen Duve
Taxi
(Taxi)
Eichborn, May 2008, 320 pp. ISBN: 978-3-8218-0953-3
The cool diva of dark wit is back
‘Please, Alexandra,’ groans the mother of Karen Duve’s
taxi-driving protagonist, ‘spare us your dreadful stories.’
The object of this plea, Alexandra (Alex) Herwig, becomes
a taxi driver for want of a better plan. She responds to a
small ad that specifically asks for female drivers, and while
her school friends embark on their second year at university,
Alex becomes ‘Twodoublefour’, ferrying theatregoers,
magazine editors, prostitutes, pimps and drunkards in her
battered Mercedes. She can’t remember street names and
she can’t stand most of her passengers, but, crucially, she
has a thing about money – real notes and coins with their
own particular smell. Unlike the other drivers, she rarely
stops for breakfast because she doesn’t want to miss out
on the cash.
misogynistic admirer, Rüdiger, who lectures Alex at every
opportunity on the inferiority of women. Bafflingly, Dietrich
becomes Alex’s boyfriend – though usually they are both too
exhausted to have much sex. That privilege is reserved for
Marco, a vertically-challenged former classmate.
Five years later things come to a head when she picks up a
mean-looking character with a pet chimpanzee and decides
to rescue the monkey. The incident ends with taxi no. 244
veering off the road. The car is a total write-off, which
means the firm can claim on the insurance, thereby saving
the debt-ridden business. The novel ends with Alex losing
her licence and making her way to Marco’s apartment.
Taxi shows Duve back in top gear. It has verve, stylistic flair
© Maurice Weiß/Ostkreuz
The first part of the novel covers episodes from her
experiences – the man who offers her 500 marks in return
for ‘touching her knee’, the racist couple who refuse to
be driven by foreigners, the drunkard who falls into the
back seat of the taxi without any cash. But the tales of
fare-dodging, violent, lascivious and irritatingly loquacious
passengers are nothing compared to the descriptions of the
other drivers, most notably the pretentious Dietrich and his
‘Sharp, funny and highly intelligent.’
– Focus
‘Merciless and honest, with
imperturbable irony. A rare novel.’
– Frankfurter Rundschau
Karen Duve
was born in 1961. She once worked
as a taxi driver and now lives near
Hamburg. She was awarded a
scholarship from Ledig House in New
York and has received several literary
awards including the Bettine von Arnim
Prize. Her critically acclaimed first
novel Rain was translated into fifteen
languages.
Previous works, and translations
thereof, include:
Regenroman (Rain), 1999; Dies ist
kein Liebeslied (This Is Not a Love
Song), 2002; Die entführte Prinzessin,
2005 – all Eichborn. Translated editions
in, among others: UK (Bloomsbury),
China, Czech Republic, Denmark,
Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Israel,
Korea, Italy, Netherlands, Norway,
Russia, Spain, Sweden and Turkey.
and characteristically dark humour, and each of its 113 short
chapters has the pace and impact of a short story, but within
the context of a novel. It is also completely authentic, Duve
herself having been a taxi driver in Hamburg for thirteen
years. Our advice? Hail it! It’s well worth the fare.
Rights to this work sold to:
Italy (Neri Pozza di Athesis); Lithuania
(Leidykla Algimantas); Netherlands
(De Geus).
Eichborn AG
Kaiserstr. 66
D – 60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Tel: +49 69 25 60 03 767
Contact: Jutta Willand
www.eichborn.de
Eichborn AG was founded in 1980,
and is one of the few independent
general publishers still operating in
Germany. Its strong and diversified
list includes fiction and non-fiction,
humour and reference books. It has two
subsidiary lists: Die Andere Bibliothek
(‘The Other Library’), founded by Hans
Magnus Enzensberger, and Eichborn
Berlin, which focuses on literary debuts
in German. Many titles originally
published by Eichborn have been
translated into English, including W.G.
Sebald’s The Emigrants and The
Rings of Saturn; A Woman in Berlin
by Anonymous (winner of the 2006
Schlegel-Tieck award); Karen Duve’s
Rain; Walter Moers’ The 13½ Lives
of Captain Bluebear and Jan Costin
Wagner’s Ice Moon.
Fiction Jenny Erpenbeck
Angelika Waldis
Heimsuchung
Die geheimen Leben der Schneiderin
Eichborn Berlin, February 2008, 192 pp. ISBN: 978-3-8218-5773-2
Kein & Aber, 2008, 160 pp. ISBN 978-3-0369-5519-3
In a house by the lake
Curl up with this delightful read
If Daphne du Maurier’s Mandalay is the setting of a single tragedy,
this moving novel, telling the story of an architect’s house on the
shore of a large lake in Brandenburg, near Berlin, chronicles a
whole succession of misfortunes. The tale starts in the years of the
Weimar Republic, when the local mayor sells off a piece of land
to provide a dowry for his mentally unstable daughter, who then
tragically commits suicide. An architect, one of the three original
buyers, builds by the lakeside the ‘summerhouse’ of his dreams,
and when the Nazis arrive pays his Jewish neighbour – too late,
alas – for his share too.
Jolie Hansen keeps a dressmaking shop in a small town near Zurich.
But as she alters the clothing of her customers, mentally she lets
out and takes in bits of their lives too – including that of Walter
Fischbacher, who would be rather keen to share hers.
(Visitation)
(The Dressmaker)
When war breaks out and the Russians storm in, house and garden
are trashed and the architect’s middle-aged wife is raped. In GDR
times the ‘dream house’ passes to two writers who have suffered
under both Nazi and Communist regimes, and then to a couple of
pensioners. Finally, now badly dilapidated, it is demolished and the
land sold off.
The house really existed and the author, Jenny Erpenbeck, actually
lived in it. Could this be why, in a remarkably modest compass, she
has succeeded in offering, with such insight and sensitivity, the
most poetic account of recent German history one could possibly
hope to read?
Her own life is neat, organised and desperately empty – she lives
alone, her grown-up daughter has a high-flying job in Geneva, her
mother is in a nursing home, her brothers and sisters have all gone
their different ways – apart from her adored older brother Franz
who, aged seventeen, went for a swim in the lake and never came
back. His headstone in the cemetery marks an empty grave. But did
he really drown?
As Jolie prepares to reunite all her family at a party for her parents’
eightieth birthdays, her quest to find out what happened to Franz
gains momentum.
Waldis’s style is beautifully pared-down and gently humorous and
her novel is a delight to read. Jolie does find Franz. But she herself
and her development as a character remain centre-stage throughout.
‘Reading Waldis is a physical experience!’ – Die Weltwoche
‘This novel is a masterpiece.’ – Der Spiegel
Eichborn AG
Tel: +49 69 25 60 03 767
Contact: Jutta Willand
www.eichborn.de
36 Fiction
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East
Berlin in 1967. She studied to become
an opera director and was taught by
Ruth Berghaus, Werner Herzog and
Heiner Müller among others. She is
now a freelance author and director.
‘Sibirien’, one of the eleven stories in
Tand, was awarded the 2001 Jury Prize
at the Festival of German-language
Literature in Klagenfurt. Other prizes
include the 2008 Solothurn Literature
Prize, the 2008 Heimito von Doderer
Literature Prize and became the 2006
Writer of Residence on the Island of Sylt.
Eichborn AG – for a description
please see review on page 5.
‘A work of virtuosity.’
– Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
© Anita Affentranger
© Katharina Behling
Rights to this work already
sold to nine countries, including UK
(Portobello) and USA (New Directions).
Kein & Aber AG
Tel: 41 44 297 12 78
Contact: Susanne von Ledebur
www.keinundaber.ch
Angelika Waldis was born in Lucerne
in 1940. She was a teacher, then studied
English and German in Zurich and
subsequently worked as a journalist.
From 1982 to 1999 she headed the
prize-winning magazine for young
people, Spick. She has been writing fulltime since 2000 and lives in Zurich. She
was awarded the coveted Swiss Young
Adults’ Book Prize for Tita und Leo.
Tita und Leo, 2001; Tu nicht so. Short
stories, 2004; Verschwinden. Two
Stories, 2006.
Kein & Aber was founded in 1997
and swiftly established itself on the
scene with its programme of fiction
and audio books. Now regarded as one
of the leading independent publishers,
it publishes around forty titles a year
and focuses on fiction, satire, children’s
books and audio books.
Brigitte Hamann
Hitlers Edeljude. Das Leben
des Armenarztes Eduard Bloch
(Hitler’s Noble Jew: The Life of Doctor Eduard Bloch)
Piper Verlag, October 2008, 450 pp with approx. 100 illustrations, ISBN: 9783492051644
A Jew held in high regard – by Hitler
This is an extraordinary story in every way. The Blochs were
a Jewish family of Czechoslovakian origin with a strong
medical tradition, and Eduard, born in 1872, combined with
his vocation as a doctor a particular sensitivity to other
people’s suffering. It was this sensitivity that came crucially
into play when Klara Hitler, the future Nazi leader’s mother,
fell ill with cancer and was tended by Bloch until her death
in 1907. Such was the young Adolf’s sense of gratitude for
these efforts that years later, when the Nazi party achieved
power, Bloch came to be recognised as Hitler’s ‘Edeljude’,
or ‘Noble Jew’. This was a term used by many antisemites
anxious to protect their special Jewish friends. But Hitler’s
personal bestowal of the term was in a different class.
He is even alleged to have said that ‘if there were more
Jews like him (Bloch), then antisemitism would not exist’.
© Peter von Felbert
No more personal meetings are recorded between doctor
and future dictator after Klara Hitler’s death, but the Bloch
family were granted many exemptions from the anti-Jewish
laws and were permitted to remain unmolested in Linz.
Symbolic of the relationship between the two men are a
couple of postcards reiterating his gratitude which Hitler
‘A unique perspective on the
Wagners, centred on the clan’s most
controversial member and most
tumultous period...Hamann diligently
explores this naive young woman’s
slow seduction by wealth and power.’
– Kirkus Reviews, starred,
on Winifred Wagner: A Life at
the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth
Brigitte Hamann,
has achieved international recognition
through her many books on the history
of Austria. Born in Essen in 1940 she
studied German and History in Münster
and Vienna. In 1964 she became an
editor with the Neue Rhein Ruhr
Zeitung and in 1965 she married the
Viennese historian Günther Hamann
and took on dual Austrian and German
citizenship. Through close academic
collaboration with her husband she
gradually embarked upon her own
path with the aim of bringing books
on historical subjects that were both
well-researched and accessible to
a wider public. She has received a
plethora of prizes.
afterwards sent to Bloch and which, alarmingly, the Gestapo
later seized, in an attempt to cover up that aspect of their
Fuhrer’s past.
Eduard’s memoirs, which he wrote in old age in New York,
and on which Brigitte Hamann has based this fascinating
book, leave no doubt about the young Hitler’s utter
desolation at his mother’s suffering and death. So how could
anyone capable of such natural and human feelings go on to
unleash such evil and inhuman acts? Bloch never managed
to resolve this contradiction. He himself had torn feelings
– between hatred of the Nazis and compassion for a once
vulnerable and unhappy young man. Of course, he had the
safety of his own family to consider. All of them, parents
and children, emigrated late in the war, at a point when it
would have been difficult if not impossible for other Jews
to do so. But that is not really the point. Readers must judge
Bloch’s motives for themselves, and in this meticulously
researched book, full of insights into Hitler’s early years and
complete with appropriate family photographs, they will
find themselves in an excellent position to do so.
Previous works and translated
editions include:
Hitlers Wien (1998) – Hungary, France,
Poland, Romania, Czech Republic,
USA/GB (Oxford University Press),
Italy; Winifred Wagner (2003) – UK
(Granta), USA (Harcourt), Hungary,
Japan, Romania; Kronprinz Rudolf
(new edition, 2006); Der Erste
Weltkrieg (2004) – all Piper Verlag.
Piper Verlag
Georgenstr. 4
80799 Munich, Germany
Tel: +49 89 30 18 01 26
Contact: Sven Diedrich
www.piper.de
Piper Verlag
was founded by Reinhard Piper in
1904. The firm published many leading
contemporary authors, a tradition
followed by the founder’s son and
grandson. After 1945 the programme
expanded to include philosophy and
non-fiction. Piper Verlag now includes
the imprints Malik, Nordiska and Piper
Fantasy, and has been part of the
Swedish group Bonnier since 1995.
Authors include Ingeborg Bachmann,
Hape Kerkeling, Annette Pehnt, Gaby
Hauptmann, Jakob Hein, Claudia
Schreiber and Robert Löhr.
‘With great diligence to primary
sources, Brigitte Hamann in Hitler’s
Vienna destroyed many of the false
assumptions about Hitler’s early life.’
– The New Statesman, 1999 Books
of the Year
Non-Fiction 11
Marion Poschmann
Hundenovelle
(Canine Novella)
Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, August 2008, 128 pp.
ISBN: 978 3 627 00149 0
This is no Lassie Come Home
The first-person narrator of this novel leads a life characterised by a self-imposed
solitude. She is a natural loner who needs and defends her space until a large, black
dog follows her home from one of her walks on a hot summer’s day.
The dog is beautiful and elegant, an imposing, graceful and energetic creature, and
the narrator finds herself torn between respect for the animal and resentment at
his intrusion. As if powerless to resist, yet often scornfully, she lets herself be drawn
into the dog owner’s world, buying food, taking him to the dog parlour, giving him
baths and taking him for walks. Yet she is not prepared to give him a name or make
him a permanent companion. At times, she recognizes similarities between them, for
example their self-sufficiency, and the way he does not seem to care much for being
touched. Yet she also finds him repulsive, especially his smell and his fleas. A whole
lot of feelings and confusion have taken over her life. She longs to tell somebody
about what has happened, but is left without friends (her own choice) or family
(her mother has died). She’d like to be rid of the dog and at the same time wants
him there. Mysteriously, she feels he knows something (about her, about what is
going to happen?), which she does not yet understand.
One day (almost out of the blue) she takes him to a lake, ties him to a tree and leaves
him there with a bone. She returns home, goes to bed and has a deep, dreamless
sleep. What follows are almost delusion-like states. She seeks the company of dogs,
buys herself dog-shaped luxury soap, dog stickers, postcards featuring dogs. She
secretly feeds dogs in the park. Days follow where she does not notice dogs at all.
She wants to return to her old life. One morning, she finds the dog in front of her
door, emaciated and weak. She welcomes him home, and he dies with a contented
face. The final scenes find her under a motorway bridge, perceiving animal shadows
and movements. Delusions. And, finally, Orion’s dogs in the night sky.
Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt
Tel: + 49 69 96 22 06 10
E-mail: [email protected]
Contact: Inka Ihmels
www.frankfurter-verlagsanstalt.de
Application for assistance with translation
costs – Germany
16 Fiction
Vor mir den Tag,
hinter mir die Nacht
(The Day Ahead,
the Night Behind)
Piper Verlag, September 2008, 192 pp
ISBN: 9783492052078
A firm favourite on the Berlin performance
circuit, appreciated for his gentle, whimsical
humour, and his eye for the potential comedy
of the everyday, Jakob Hein (son of that
star of the GDR firmament, Christoph Hein)
delivers another engaging Berlin treat, as
Rebecca finds when she encounters Boris
and his Agency for Discarded Ideas.
This eccentric operator catalogues shreds
and snatches of ideas (mostly his own, she
suspects) together with starts of stories
and cast-off beginnings that may never be
united with the endings he finds so difficult
to write. Rebecca, however, has captivated
him: he knows he’ll have to tell his best
story ever to keep her there.
Delightfully light of touch, this is a
sweet tale of a quest for happiness
and a humorous spin on an unlikely
male Shehezerade, Berlin-bred, and his
marvellous power of storytelling.
Marion Poschmann
was born in Essen in 1969 and now lives in Berlin.
She read German, Philosophy and Slavonic Studies
at university and is a prize-winning author of poetry
and prose. Previous works include Grund zu schafen
(‘Reason to Sheep’) and Schwarzweissroman
(‘Black and White Novel’) – both with FVA. Her novel
Schwarzweissroman was longlisted for the 2005
German Book Prize.
The Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt
is an independent publishing house headed by
Joachim Unseld. With a focus on new German fiction
by young authors and some translated contemporary
foreign fiction, it has secured an excellent reputation
in the ten or so years since it was launched. Authors
include Zoë Jenny, Bodo Kirchhoff, Gerd Loschütz,
Christoph Peters, Thomas von Steinaecker, and
Michael Wallner.
© Nelly Rau-Häring
© Laura J Gerlach
Shades of A.L. Kennedy’s So I am Glad? An original, compelling mixture.
Jakob Hein
Jakob Hein was born in Leipzig in 1971. He grew up
in Berlin where he lives today as a practicing doctor
together with his wife and two sons. His books have
been translated into seven languages.
Piper Verlag, see page 11.
Steffen Kopetzky
Der letzte Dieb
(The Last Thief)
Luchterhand, September 2008, 480 pp. ISBN: 978-3-630-87274-2
Racoons? I’ll give you racoons.
Alexander Salem is a jaded professional thief in his
mid-thirties, who messes up a major job and gets into big
trouble with his agent and a sinister Russian philatelist.
Johanna Meister is a washed-up former GDR secret agent
with a photographic memory and the key to a mysterious
plan called ‘Operation North Pole’. Hawk Browning is a
wealthy pulp fiction writer in New York, suffering from
severe writer’s block and an obsession with the treasure
of Atlantis. Steffen Kopetzky’s literary thriller, a new line
for him, unites this disparate trio in a plot that moves from
the lights of Monte Carlo to Berlin’s down-at-heel Neukölln
district, takes in a span of years from 1923 to 2001, and
follows its characters until their paths cross in a labyrinthine
bunker under Tempelhof airport.
© by Oliver Mark
With numerous other characters and a parallel strand
about Alexander’s grandfather that is eventually woven
into the present-day plot, the book, in less skilled hands,
could have become over-complicated, but Kopetzky’s loving
attention to even the most minor figures makes them all
three-dimensional. He offers interesting asides, from the
history of Berlin’s wild racoon population to historical
‘A virtuoso play on chance and time,
travel and complicated watches.
A pleasure to read.’
– Die Welt, on Grand Tour
14 Crime Fiction
Steffen Kopetzky
was born in 1971. He has published
three novels to date and writes for
radio, newspapers and magazines, as
well as writing opera libretti and plays
for both stage and radio. Kopetzky has
been awarded the Carinthian State
Prize, the Carolina Prize for Journalism,
ARD’s Kurt Magnus Prize and the Elske
Lasker Schüler Prize for Drama.
Grand Tour (‘Grand Tour’) – 2002.
Reviewed nbg Autumn 2002; Einbruch
und Wahn (‘Incursion and Illusion’)
– 2004; Lost/Found (‘Lost/Found’)
– 2005; Eine uneigentliche Reise
(‘A Journey that Never Happened’)
– 2005.
descriptions of parts of the city itself, and countless details
about locks and lock-picking. And although there are many
subtle threads and leitmotifs linking the characters without
their knowledge, the storyline never becomes unbelievable.
On the contrary, it teases the reader with changes of pace,
starting fast and slowing down to expand the plot but
keeping him on his toes with key scenes to await the
action-packed finale. This, when it comes, turns the action
on its head. It is literally only with the final sentence that
the whole truth is revealed.
Crisply told in a rather cinematic style, the novel’s most
obvious inspirations would seem to be films, with its
gentleman thief, talented super-agent, and secret Nazi
treasure. And indeed a film might not be out of the question.
But meanwhile here is no throwaway potboiler but a
finely-crafted piece of work, evocative even of Le Carré in
his latest mode. The last three words mirror the opening
sentence, showing how much care has gone into the
book’s construction.
A thinking person’s thriller for the twenty-first century.
Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH
Neumarkter Str. 28
Tel: +49 89 41 36 3313
Email: gesche.wendebourg@
randomhouse.de
Contact: Gesche Wendebourg
www.randomhouse.de
‘When did we last see this? A German
novel that reads as easily as John
Irving. The reader laughs and suffers
with the hero, reads the night away,
and is sad when this Grand Tour is over.
But one has found a friend for life.’
– Joachim Scholl, on Grand Tour
Luchterhand Literaturverlag
was founded by Hermann Luchterhand
in 1924 and has been publishing
literary titles since 1954, an early
and triumphant success being Günter
Grass’s novel Die Blechtrommel
(1959). Its list includes literary fiction
and poetry as well as scrupulously
prepared editions of authors’ complete
works. In 1997 the firm was voted
Publishing House of the Year by the
German trade journal Buchmarkt.
Luchterhand is now part of the Random
House Group. Authors include Christa
Wolf, Ernst Jandl, Pablo Neruda,
António Lobo Antunes, Will Self, Frank
McCourt, Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Terézia
Mora and Saša Stanišić.
Ilma Rakusa
© Britta Rating
An interesting and important
development on the Germanlanguage literary scene over the
past few years has been the rise
of German-language writers
with a migrant background. And
not only is there an increase
in their number but also in the
cultural weight they carry. The
arts pages devote lengthy essays
to them, juries shower them with
important prizes, symposiums
and anthologies document
the growing interest they are
attracting. And quite right, too.
For it is these newcomers to
the German language who are
enriching the literature of today’s
Germany, Austria and Switzerland
with new impulses and colours,
with appealing subject matter and
unusual turns of phrase. Writers
like the Turkish Emine Sevgi
Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu
or Japanese-born Yoko Tawada,
Zsuzanna Gahse and Terézia Mora
both of Hungarian descent or the
Bulgarian-born Ilija Trojanow and
Dimitré Dinev, Michael Stavaric
from Moravia and the young
Bosnian writer Saša Stanišić – their
Feridun Zaimoglu, author of
Kanak Sprak
origins may be as varied as their
books and yet they have one thing
in common: an outside perspective
on their German surroundings and
language.
© Lukas Beck
A testimony worth listening to
is that of Harald Weinrich, who
in 1985 set up the Adelbert
von Chamisso Prize specifically
for writers with a ‘migration’
background. He says that the
absorbed experience of otherness
which characterises the outsider’s
perspective leads to a ‘shaking
up of habit’ and does not
indulge in the ‘routine usage of
everyday language.’ These are,
according to Weinrich, the optimal
preconditions for poetic language
and the ‘capturing of a world.’
Michael Stavaric’s latest novel
Magma is published by Residenz Verlag
this autumn
18 ARTICLE
article
Their contribution, therefore, is
not that they are exotic, but that
they bring about an expansion of
perspective and an exploration
of the possibilities of expression
in language. In Kanak Sprak,
for example, Feridun Zaimoglu
created an idiom that mixed the
slang of the children of ‘guestworkers’ with Anatolian dialect:
‘…It’s a Babylonian hotchpotch of
a brazenly conspicuous, brazenly
needled generation…It contains
snatches of provincial dialect and
touches of High Turkish as well
as the metaphor-laden staccato
street and urban slang. (…)
Kanak Sprak stands for a surge
of images, bringing vigour to the
melody of language and verve to
the scene.’ Zaimoglu’s language,
with its combination of urban
underclass problems and oriental
legends, of social criticism and
opulent Eastern narration, was a
sweeping success among a most
diverse group of readers.
While Emine Sevgi Özdamar hasn’t
launched a Kanak Attack, she
is regarded as an enchantress
with language. Her German is
de-familiarised through Turkish
turns-of-phrase and metaphors,
it has something of the fairy-tale
about it and sometimes seems like
a translation from some archaically
flowery idiom. This is prevalent in
the very titles of her books: Life is
a Caravanserai. Has Two Doors.
I came in One. I Went out the
Other. Özdamar’s prose revolves
around the paradox of a double
identity that is continuously nailed
to language itself – the ‘Mother
Tongue’ and the foreign language,
in this case German. Exploring
the world and oneself is in effect
exploring language. And thus
Gastgesichter (‘Guest-Faces’),
one of Özdamar’s many short
stories, begins with a reflection
upon language: ‘When I was a
child in Istanbul, the first European
word I heard was “Deux-Pièces”.
Every Monday my parents went
to the Teyvare Sinemasi cinema.
Its name means Flugzeugkino
Ilma Rakusa
(‘Airplane Cinema’). That cinema
showed European films only …
“What are you going to wear?”
they asked each week. One day
my mother replied, “I’m going to
wear my Deux-Pièces.” “What’s
that, Mother?” I asked, “What
does Deux-Pièces mean?” “DeuxPièces means Deux-Pièces,” my
mother answered.’ The transfer
of language is comic and full of
misunderstandings. That is what
Özdamar capitalizes on – to
surprising and refreshing effect.
Zsuzsanna Gahse turns just as
exacting an eye on words, as if
having to test, weigh up, probe
each one. Scepticism towards
language and revelling in language
are the two sides of the coin for
this Hungarian, born in 1946.
She claims that ‘every word is
a translation and time lingers
over every word.’ Readers of her
wonderfully original recent books
– for example, durch und durch
(‘through and through’), Instabile
Texte / zu zweit (‘Unstable Texts
/ in twos’), or Oh, Roman (‘Oh,
Roman’ – in German the title
© Helga Kneidl
Notes on Contemporary German-Language
‘Migrant’ Literature
© Simon M. Ingold
Surprising Angles and
Linguistically Enriching:
Sevgi Emine Özdamar read at the
South Bank this summer
plays with the dual meaning of
Roman, both a man’s name and
the word for ‘novel’) – also have
to linger over the writing itself
for the words are always being
questioned. Here’s an example:
‘…all the words in the following
text have a virus. It’s possible
they’ll infect the neighbouring
words that are still intact, or those
words that could be here but
don’t dare to be out of fear (the
fear of being silenced). The first
of August is a national holiday in
Switzerland and associated with
a corresponding amount of noise.
While brightly coloured fireworks
flew through the sky this year and
you could hardly hear your own
voice (to hear – “vernehmen”
– is a particularly infected word,
although “infected” is also in a
precarious position – add another
letter to it as many people do
and the word is dead), there was
an incident in Lucerne of the sort
referred to as a “Fenstersturz”
(‘defenestration’). Or simply
“Brückli” for those in the know,
and those who aren’t are none
the wiser…’
this, it is always distinctive.
In the case of the young writer
Saša Stanišić, whose debut
© Sigrid Rother
How the Soldier Repairs the
Gramophone quickly became
Writer Yoko Tawada
and German and discovers so
much strangeness in her German
surroundings, and also in the
German language, that to read
her is to be constantly amazed.
For Tawada, too, everything
begins with words, or even with
the alphabet. ‘What, for example,
does an “A” say to me? The
longer I stare at a letter, the more
mysterious and alive it becomes…
It can be dangerous to unleash
a letter into the world, for the
writer, or the typesetter, cannot
know what will become of it. You
write a “B” – it might become a
Blossom but also a Bomb. Every
letter in the alphabet is unreliable,
unpredictable and full of the
unexpected.’ (Tübingen Poetics
Lectures). It’s not for nothing
that Tawada’s books sport titles
like Von der Muttersprache
zur Sprachmutter (‘From the
Mother-Tongue to the TongueMother’), Das Wörterbuchdorf
(‘The Dictionary Village’) or
Überseezungen (‘Overseas
Tongues’ – in German this title
plays on the word for translation,
Übersetzung). Hers is prose with
ethnological as well as poetic
elements that both disenchant
and enchant. The surreal aspect
of Tawada’s writing can be traced
to two widely differing cultures
reflected in one another. Only
in Tawada’s writing does one
find ‘faces that can be flicked
through like a travel guide’ and
the observation that someone
speaking a foreign language is ‘an
ornithologist and a bird at once.’
Interestingly it is this ponderous
style that makes the words
both three-dimensional and
introspective. At any rate nothing
is taken for granted here, or
slips through. No matter what is
recounted, language is part of it.
© Julia Scheiermann
This is even more extreme in the
case of the Japanese writer Yoko
Tawada. Tawada, who came to
Germany at the age of nineteen
and made it her permanent
home aged twenty-two. She
writes alternately in Japanese
Terézia Mora
While it is not always the case
that this heightened awareness
of language of ‘migrant’ authors
breeds such wondrous flowers as
a bestseller, one reviewer was
prompted to claim that Stanišić
had given an oxygen boost to the
‘old German’. Indeed, the author
peppers his tragic-burlesque
novel, told from the imaginative
perspective of a fourteen-yearold during the Bosnian war with
foreign-sounding turns-of-phrase,
jokes and curses, with opulent
images and original metaphors.
Referring to the first-person
narrator he writes, here in
Anthea Bell’s translation, ‘I’m a
mixture. I’m half and half. There
was everyone in the schoolyard
wondering how I could be
something so vague, there were
discussions about whose blood
is stronger in your body, male or
female, and me wishing I could
be something not so vague, or a
made-up thing (…), a German
autobahn, a flying horse that
drinks wine, a shot in the throat
of a house.’ Stanišić’s language is
playful. It is bold, crosses borders
and is the perfect fit for a different
gaze upon a war with wounds still
palpable today.
Winners of the Adelbert
von Chamisso Prize
2008 Saša Stanišić
2007 Magdalena Sadlon
2006 Zsuzsanna Gahse
2005 Feridun Zaimoglu
2004 Asfa-Wossen Asserate
2003 Ilma Rakusa
2002 Said
2001 Zehra Çirek
2000 Ilija Trojanow
1999 Emine Sevgi Özdamar
1998 Natascha Wodin
1997 Güney Dal
1996 Yoko Tawada
1995 György Dalos
Leipzig Book Fair Prize
2008 Short List for Fiction
Jenny Erpenbeck:
Heimsuchung (Eichborn Berlin)
Sherko Fatah: Das dunkle
Schiff (Jung und Jung)
Clemens Meyer: Die Nacht, die
Lichter (S. Fischer Verlag)
Ulrich Peltzer: Teil der Lösung
(Ammann Verlag)
Feridun Zaimoglu: Liebesbrand
(Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch)
Clemens Meyer won the award.
Leipzig Book Fair Prize
Short List for Non-Fiction
Bernd Greiner: Krieg ohne
Fronten. Die USA in Vietnam
In conclusion, and without
exaggeration, it is the writers
who have come to German
culture from elsewhere who are
substantially enriching, expanding
and stimulating that culture
– not only through their unusual
literary subjects but through their
courageous, at times risk-taking,
use of language. Routine has no
place here – daring is everything.
Which provides the reader with
a unique chance: to rediscover
him- or herself through a mirror
of unfamiliarity.
Ilma Rakusa, born in Slovakia in
1946, is a writer and translator.
Prizes include the Petrarca
Translation Prize (1991) and the
Vilenica Prize for Central European
literature (2005). Translations
include works by Marguerite Duras,
Marina Tsvetaeva, Anton Chekov
and Imre Kertész.
Translated by Rebecca Morrison
(Hamburger Edition)
Thomas Karlauf: Stefan
George. Die Entdeckung des
Charisma (Karl Blessing Verlag)
Irina Liebmann: Wäre es
schön? Es wäre schön! Mein
Vater Rudolf Herrnstadt
(Berlin Verlag)
Michael Maar: Solus Rex. Die
schöne böse Welt des Vladimir
Nabokov (Berlin Verlag)
Jan Philipp Reemtsma:
Vertrauen und Gewalt.
Versuch über eine besondere
Konstellation der Moderne
(Hamburger Edition)
Irina Liebmann won the award.
The Georg Büchner Prize, one of
the most important annual prizes
and awarded for an author’s whole
body of work, went this year to
Austrian Josef Winkler.
This year’s Ingeborg Bachmann
Prize in Klagenfurt was won by
Tilman Ramstedt. His novel will be
published by DuMont later this year.
article 19
ARTICLE
Philipp Moog
Hansjörg Schneider
Lebenslänglich
Hunkeler und die goldene Hand
DuMont, August 2008, 189 pp. ISBN: 978-3-8321-8075-1
Ammann Verlag, Spring 2008, 256 pp. ISBN: 9783250105169
All’s fair in love and banking
Death at the Spa
The setting of this stylish first thriller is Munich and the killer,
through whose diary the story is told, is a short, fat, bank teller
with thinning red hair and piggy features, full of pathological selfloathing and a misfit both outside the bank and within. Hopelessly
he lusts after two pretty female colleagues, but the only person
who lusts after him is, unfortunately, the sexually aggressive
Marlene, whose bawdy physicality and insistent pleas he finds
repulsive. Right from the start of the book the reader knows he
is in sure authorial hands, debut effort though this is, as the first
of the bank teller’s victims disappears over a precipice, helped
on his way by a hefty clunk on the back of the head with a rock.
It is one of the pretty girls’ boyfriends, and the other’s will soon
be dead, too.
Hunkeler, the grouchy, elderly detective inspector from the Basel
Criminal Investigation Department, whose seventh appearance
before the public this is, is on sick leave receiving treatment for his
bad back. He waits impatiently for his turn at the spa’s Jacuzzi jet
when suddenly there is uproar. Two chattering women stop talking
and start screaming for help, a body in the main pool comes into
view, gushing blood, various unidentified figures streak past and
disappear. Then a distraught young man with a knife strapped to
his leg rushes forward. He is the boyfriend of the victim, a Basel
art collector and gallery owner, and he is immediately arrested.
But did he do it?
It really is time that the endearing Hunkeler, a wise, independentminded and sometimes accident-prone loner, got a showing in
Britain. After all, just think Andrea Camillieri, for instance. The
sex here is mixed – the detective’s assistant, as well as the young
suspect in the case, is gay. The setting is the interesting triangle
of territory embracing Alsace, the Black Forest, and of course
Basel itself and the cantons surrounding it. And then there are the
frequent samplings of those delicious Alsacian wines. Irresistible.
(Life)
(Hunkeler and the Golden Hand)
Inevitably the police investigations reach the bank, and as
the circle of suspicion is about to narrow down to the narrator,
Marlene, in a last-ditch attempt to cement their relationship,
throws him an alibi.
With its claustrophobic settings, skilfully ambiguous ending
and terrific pacing, this page-turner’s a winner.
Philipp Moog
was born in 1961. An actor and
screenwriter, this is his first novel.
He lives in Munich.
Hansjörg Schneider
was born in 1938 in the small Swiss
town of Aarau near the Jura mountains.
He has written a wealth of plays and
novels and has been awarded the major
crime novel awards and others for his
work in the theatre. He lives in Basel.
DuMont Buchverlag GmbH & Co. KG
Amsterdamer Straße 192
50735 Cologne, Germany
Tel: +49 221 2241942
E: [email protected]
Contact: Judith Habermas
www.dumontverlag.de
DuMont Buchverlag
was founded in 1956. Stressing the link
between literature and art, the firm
focuses both on these subjects and
also, more recently, on general nonfiction. Its authors include John von
Düffel, Michel Houellebecq, Helmut
Krausser, Martin Kluger, Judith Kuckart,
Thomas Kling, Annette Mingels, Haruki
Murakami, Charlotte Roche, Claude
Simon, Edward St. Aubyn, Tilman
Rammstedt, Raphael Urweider, and
Dirk Wittenborn.
© René Ruis
© Christian Hartmann
Ammann Verlag & Co.
Tel: +41 44 268 10 42
Contact: Kathrin Baumann
www.ammann.ch
Silberkiesel (1993); Das Paar im
Kahn (1999); Tod einer Ärztin (2001);
Hunkeler macht Sachen (2004) – all
Ammann Verlag.
translation costs – Switzerland
‘Excellent characterisation and
perfect narrative rhythm and drive.’
– Das Kulturmagazin
For more information about Ammann
Verlag please contact the Editor.
Crime Fiction 13
(For readers 12+)
(Young adults)
Peter Munch
Anne C. Voorhoeve
Der Duft des Lindenbaums.
Ein Tagebuch aus Sarajewo
Einundzwanzigster Juli
February 2008, 196 pp. ISBN: 978 3 473 35283 8
Taught to love an ideology
– but when reality colours that?
(The Scent of the Lime-Tree: A Diary from Sarajevo)
A young voice from Sarajevo
For years a journalist in war-torn regions of the world, Peter Münch
returned ten years after the end of hostilities to the Balkans and
chanced upon a story and a diary that prompted him to try his hand
at another genre, so acute was his need to tell the tale of Nina.
This striking work of ‘fiction’ with a strong authentic base acquaints
the reader with an ordinary little girl called Nina whose home
is Sarajevo, her family life, her love of dancing and animals, the
first stirrings of love, all chronicled in a diary decorated with girly
stickers – into these entries creeps an increasing presence of war.
The girls don’t like to be in the cellar as the bombs fall, explosions
become part of the city’s noise-scape. At the age of twelve, just
weeks before the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995, Nina
is hit by a piece of shrapnel and dies, apparently the last of the
children to be killed in the war.
It is an unassuming plaque in her old neighbourhood that captured
Münch’s attention, as it does that of his protagonist, fictional
school-friend Elvis. Determined to find out what happened to her,
and armed with her old diary, he opens himself to an onslaught of
childhood memories and lives the war again through her writing.
The power of this work lies in the simplicity and openness of Nina’s
real voice as her diary is printed in its entirety, and in the author’s
careful handling of it.
(Twenty-First of July)
Ravensburger Buchverlag, October 2008, 352 pp. ISBN: 978-3-473-35293-7
Two quotes serve as a frontispiece to Anne Voorhoeve’s excellent
new novel: one from Sophie Scholl, the student resistance leader
executed by the Nazis in 1943, and one from von Stauffenberg,
executed for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler in
July 1944.
Fritzi Bredemer returns to the family home in Berlin-Charlottenburg,
a neighbourhood in ruins, after two years in East Prussia, where she
had been evacuated with other children to ensure their safety. There
she had been educated in Nazi ideology and is now a committed,
idealistic member of the BDM, the Nazi youth movement. Soon,
however, she recognizes that her family are living by quite different
standards - could her mother, a former aristocrat, even be working
for the Resistance? Sent on then to stay with other relatives in
South-West Germany as the devastation in Berlin continues, Fritzi
learns to question all she has known, believed in and felt.
From the first page the reader is plunged into the thick of the exciting
action. The conflicting feelings of this teenage girl, longing for her
mother’s love and approval, her experiences of the horror of war
and her realization that there are other values than those she has
so far been taught, are sensitively portrayed and the details of life in
Germany during the final year of the war are fascinating. A suspenseful
and thought-provoking novel from an assured and practised hand.
Peter Münch was born in 1960 and
has a doctorate in history. He lives
with his two sons in Munich. He has
been a reporter with the Süddeutsche
Zeitung since 1990. In 2003 he
received the Media Ethics Award for
his reporting on Iraq.
Anne Charlotte Voorhoeve
was born in Germany in 1963. She
read Political Science, American Studies
and Ancient History at the University
of Mainz and Comparative Literature
at the University of Maryland. She
has worked as a newspaper and book
editor and a public relations consultant
for a Lutheran monastery. Since 2000
she has been a full-time freelance writer.
Paul & Peter Fritz AG
Jupiterstrasse 1, CH-8032 Zürich
Tel: +41 44 388 41 43
Contact: Antonia Fritz
www.fritzagency.com
© Private
© Private
Translated editions of this work
include: Rizzoli, Italy (Il profumo
del tiglio. Diario di Nina, 12 anni, a
Sarajevo); Kult-B, Bosnia (forthcoming)
Contact the editor for information
about the agency and publisher.
‘What touches one most about Nina’s
diary is the innocence – even if the
keeper of this journal is very aware
of what is at stake.’ – Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung
30 CHILDREN’s and young adults’
Ravensburger Buchverlag
Tel: +49 751-861240
Contact: Florence Christ and
Susanne Pfeiffer
www.foreignrights-ravensburger.com
Contact the editor for information
about Ravensburger Buchverlag.
Forthcoming translated
editions of previous novel
Liverpool Street:
USA (Penguin); France (Bayard);
Netherlands (Callenbach).
‘You can’t fail to be moved by this
novel.’ – FAZ
Ingrid Noll
Kuckuckskind
(Cuckoo’s Child)
Diogenes Verlag, July 2008, 352 pp. ISBN: 978 3 257 06632 6
There were three in the bed and the little one said . . .
In the opening section of her latest and very welcome
novel, Ingrid Noll’s protagonist, grammar school teacher
Anja, catches her husband Gernot with another woman.
As her relationship disintegrates, she moves out of their
shared flat and seeks solace in a solitary world of Soduku.
She also begins to suspect that her best friend and
colleague, Birgit, may herself have been having an affair
with Gernot, and when a child, Victor Augustus, is born Anja
finds so little family resemblance between the baby and
Birgit’s husband Steffen that she persuades the latter to
take a DNA test. When the test shows that he is not Victor’s
father, he is unable to cope and arrives at the house which
Anja is now sharing with her new lover, Patrick, covered
in specks of blood, and mysteriously hands over the baby
before driving off.
© Regine Mosimann / Diogenes Verlag
Anja enjoys playing mother to Victor and Patrick relishes
taking on the role of the baby’s father. Yet the mystery of
the child’s paternity remains. Anja conducts a secret DNA
test and establishes that Gernot is also not the father. It is,
however, when she sees a photograph of Patrick’s daughter
‘An exquisite, wicked novel’
– Die Welt on Kuckuckskind
‘Ingrid Noll is often referred to
as Germany’s “Queen of Crime”,
and she fully deserves this title.’
– The Sunday Times
12 Crime Fiction
Ingrid Noll
was born 1935 in Shanghai, studied
German philology and art history
in Bonn, and is the mother of three
grown-up children. After they left home
she began to write crime stories, which
all became instant bestsellers. Head
Count received the Glauser Prize and
is just one of her novels to have been
successfully adapted for the screen.
Lenore as a baby that she discovers the truth. Realising that
Lenore and Victor are almost identical, she confronts Patrick
with the suggestion that he must have had a relationship
with Birgit before he met Anja. He responds by sharing his
own fears that Victor is not his son, but his grandson.
The final sections of the novel also see the resolution of
the mystery of Steffen and Birgit’s disappearance. Steffen
is initially found having been admitted to hospital after
a car crash. He takes his own life, leaving Anja a suicide
note in which he blames her for the family’s misfortune
and confesses that he stabbed Birgit in the argument over
Victor’s paternity. Whether or not he actually murdered her
is left deliberately unclear.
Despite its stark storyline and its unblinking engagement
with the complexities of family life and female friendship,
the book is nonetheless extremely enjoyable to read.
Laced as it is with delicious dark humour and the author’s
trademark strain of seductive irony, it is Noll at her best.
Previous works by the author,
all Diogenes:
Der Hahn ist tot (1991); Die
Häupter meiner Lieben (1993);
Die Apothekerin (1994); Der
Schweinepascha (1996); Kalt ist der
Abendhauch (1996); Röslein Rot
(1998); Stich für Stich (1997); Die
Sekretärin (2000); Selige Witwen
(2001); Rabenbrüder (2003); Falsche
Zungen (2004); Ladylike (2006).
Ingrid Noll’s books have been
translated into twenty-eight languages.
Diogenes Verlag AG
Sprecherstr. 8
8032 Zurich, Switzerland
Tel: +41 44 254 8511
Contact: Susanne Bauknecht
www.diogenes.ch
Diogenes Verlag
was founded in Zurich in 1952 by
Daniel Keel and Rudolf C. Bettschart.
One of the leading international
publishing houses, it numbers among
its authors Alfred Andersch, Friedrich
Dürrenmatt, Urs Widmer, Patricia
Highsmith, Donna Leon, Bernhard
Schlink and Patrick Süskind. Children’s
authors include Tatjana Hauptmann,
Ute Krause, Friedrich Karl Waechter
and Tomi Ungerer.
Ingo Schulze
Adam und Evelyn
(Adam and Evelyn)
Berlin Verlag, August 2008, 320 pp. ISBN-13: 9783827008107
Paradise Lost?
Two years ago Ingo Schulze produced his splendid, and in
every sense weighty, ‘Wende novel’, Neues Leben. There
followed a prize-winning collection of short stories. Now he
returns to the novel form again, this time relatively compact
and dialogue-driven, distinctive and winning in its flavour
and graced, if subtly, with some prelapsarian connotations.
Adam is a tailor and clothes designer par excellence, not
averse to bedding the women to whom his creations give
their transitory moment of beauty and content with his lot
in his East German home town. Not so Evelyn (Eve), with
whom he lives, and who dreams of a different sort of life in
a different sort of place where she could study, for instance,
the history of art. Her frustration overflows when she comes
upon Adam and the frolicsome Lilli (Lilith?) in flagrante
delicto. She leaves for Hungary on holiday without him,
joining her friend Mona (the snake in Adam’s paradise?)
and Mona’s West German cousin who is frank in the
expression of his affections for her. Adam sets off in hot
but amusingly amicable pursuit, with pet tortoise Elfriede
as his travelling companion – and soon also with a sparky
young lady who is fiercely determined to leave the East,
willing to swim the Danube, cross borders in the trunks
of cars, whatever it takes.
It is 1989, however, and the changes to come are in the
air. Schulze skilfully recreates the temporary communities
that sprang up along the Hungarian border as word filtered
through that access to Austria would soon be open, and
the holidaying group in idyllic Balaton are in a place on the
brink of irrevocable change. Is this a chance to seize? And if
so with whom? Will Adam return to his comfortable life in
the GDR and join the voices of protest there? He is tempted.
Or will his love for Evelyn lead him to follow her in her West
German dream? Will that dream, in any case, prove anything
more than a shallow shell offering all that money can buy
but nothing else?
Schulze handles his themes and characters with all his charm,
wisdom and experience, capturing the atmosphere of those
certain months in that especially memorable year. There is
a lightness of touch here that doesn’t dilute the impact of
hope, disillusion and fraught relations that are the minefield
to be crossed in the pursuit of any imagined Garden of Eden.
© Jim Rakete
44 Fiction
Ingo Schulze
was born in Dresden in 1962, studied
classical philosophy in Jena and then
worked in Altenburg as a playwright
and newspaper editor. He has lived
in Berlin since 1993. He won many
prizes for his first book, 33 Moments
of Happiness, including the Aspekte
Literature Prize and in the same year
the New Yorker named him one
of their ‘Six Best European Young
Novelists’ while the Observer listed
him as ‘one of the twenty-one authors
to look out for in the twenty-first
century’. For Simple Storys, he received
the Berlin Literature Prize (Johannes
Bobrowski medal). Ingo Schulze’s major
novel Neue Leben was published in
2005, earning him the Premio Grinzane
Cavour that year. His short story
collection Handy (2007) won the Prize
of the Leipzig Book Fair.
His books are translated into
twenty-five languages.
English-language editions have been
published by Macmillan (UK) and
Knopf (USA). For further details
contact the editor.
Translation rights to Adam und
Evelyn sold to:
Sweden (Weyler Bokförlag)
Berlin Verlag GmbH
Greifswalder Str. 207
10405 Berlin, Germany
Tel: +49 30 44 38 450
Contact: Sabine Oswald
www.berlinverlage.de
Berlin Verlag – see book review on
page 10 for a description.
‘Ingo Schulze has written a light
and erotically charged story about
Reunification’ – Die Zeit
‘A flawless novel.’ – Süddeutsche
Zeitung
‘Ingo Schulze has outdone himself.’
– Der Tagesspiegel
‘A tender, multiple love story à la Jules
et Jim.’ – Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung
‘A political comedy with poetic depth.’
– NDR
Oliver Storz
Die Freibadclique
(The Lido Clique)
SchirmerGraf Verlag, August 2008, 256 pp. ISBN: 978-3-86555-057-6
A narrative suffused with melancholy and beauty
Die Freibadclique is a short and sharp novel about the
‘class of 29’, a group of German boys who are fifteen years
old in 1944, the very youngest group to be drafted into the
Nazi war effort in an atmosphere of political chaos, poor
military training and sinking morale. The action starts in the
late summer of that year. The Russians are at the gates of
Warsaw, the Western Allies are nearing Aachen, and a gang
of five adolescents hang around the local outdoor swimming
pool lusting after a pretty young woman called Lore, as
boys are wont to do. Soon they will be called up to military
service. A year later, when the war has been lost, only two
of them (the narrator and his friend Bubu) return to school.
© SchirmerGraf Verlag
Although offered as fiction, the book is based closely on
the experiences of author Oliver Storz, who also turned
fifteen in the small town Schwäbisch Hall in 1944, and
was also conscripted into the German armed forces. It is a
coming-of-age novel in which we know pretty much from
the outset that few of the participants will have an adult
life. The narrator tells us bluntly at the very beginning that
one of the boys, nicknamed Zungenkuss, will be dead eight
Oliver Storz
was born in Mannheim in 1929 and
worked as a teacher for a short time
before joining the Stuttgarter Zeitung
as its arts editor and theatre critic.
Three years later he joined the Bavaria
film studios as a writer, producer and
dramaturge, later also a director. His
films won prizes. Much acclaimed was
his recent two-part film for television
on the Brandt-Guillaume affair.
weeks later. Another, Knuffke, a war-orphan from the
heavy bombings on Berlin, will stay with us through most
of the novel’s course, but we are warned of his imminent
death, too.
The atmosphere of the novel is that of disillusionment,
melancholy, and even tragedy. Knuffke is murdered because
of his involvement in black-market dealings and murky
Allied-German relations at the end of the war. The beautiful
dental nurse Gunda tells the passion-struck narrator how
she has made herself sexually available to men to save her
skin on the Polish-German border. And the narrator himself,
when he finds that he does not have the will and courage to
avenge Knuffke’s death through yet another murder, strikes
the final note of lost idealism and innocence.
This story brings out fresh notes. The crisp dialogue and
the depiction of the nebulous world of adolescence work
well. Memoir or closely observed piece of fiction, the
book carries a sense of authentic experience that brings
it thoroughly alive.
SchirmerGraf Verlag
Widenmayerstr.16
Tel: +49 89 21 26 70 - 0
Contact: Nina Beck
www.schirmer-graf.de
SchirmerGraf Verlag,
with its credo ‘Reading is dreaming
with open eyes’, is an independent
literary publishing house in Munich.
The focus is on contemporary
international and German narrative
literature, new editions of Modernist
classics as well as the writings,
diaries and correspondence of artists.
Particular care is given to the design
of the books. Tanja Graf, formerly
senior fiction editor at Piper Verlag,
and Lothar Schirmer, publisher also
of Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, head the
publishing house.
‘A youth spent in Germany, in gleaming,
bright prose. From the street, to the
lido, to the front. Brilliant.’
– Alexander Gorkow,
Süddeutsche Zeitung
Fiction 37
Uwe Timm
Halbschatten
(Half-Light)
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, August 2008, 272 pp. ISBN: 978-3-462-04043-2
Voices from beyond the grave and soaring memories
Berlin’s Invaliden Cemetery, the starting point and recurring
focus of Uwe Timm’s ambitious new novel, was, from the
time of its founder, Frederick the Great, until 1950, when
it fell into disuse and decay, the last resting place of
Germany’s military dead. Officers killed in the Napoleonic
Wars, First World War air aces, leading Nazis, Berliners killed
in air raids – the cast list is huge. But among all these dead
lies only one woman. She is Marga von Etzdorf, a famous
solo flier of the interwar years and the German counterpart
of Britain’s Amy Johnson, whose life ended tragically when
she landed in Syria on her third flight to Australia and shot
herself there, for reasons still unknown. It is on her account
that the narrator (Timm himself perhaps?) has asked for a
tour of the cemetery, in the late afternoon of a cold, dank
All Souls Day, with a specially recommended elderly guide
referred to simply as ‘The Grey Man’.
© Isolde Ohlbaum
But who is this guide? How does he come to know so much,
and on such arcane subjects? Why is he wearing such eerily
unsuitable shoes? And how, most of all, can he make the
dead speak from their graves? They answer when called
‘Rarely has the German past been
written about more soberly and more
tenderly, more delicately and more
frankly.’ – Frankfurter Allgemeine
about In My Brother’s Shadow
‘One of the most important of
contemporary German writers.’
– Modern Language Review
Uwe Timm
was born in 1940 in Hamburg. After
an apprenticeship in the fur trade,
he studied German literature and
philosophy in Munich and Paris. He
writes for both adults and children, and
has received prizes for his work in both
fields. His books have been translated
into fourteen languages.
Morenga (1983); Der Schlangenbaum
(1986); Die Entdeckung der
Currywurst (1993); Johannisnacht
(1996); Rot (2001 – reviewed nbg);
Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003
– reviewed nbg) – all Kiepenheuer
& Witsch.
Translated editions of previous
works have been published by:
New Directions (USA); Farrar Straus &
Giroux (USA); Picador (UK); Bloomsbury
(UK); Gyldendal (Norway and
upon, some briefly, some at more length. Some of their
voices are grotesquely muffled, because they are still so
full of earth. Or again, there may be the sound of a violin.
That is Reinhard Heydrich playing Mozart. So we have here
three elements: the makings of an underground novel, an
overrview of two hundred years of German and Prussian
military history, and Marga’s own story, which predominates.
Her love life, as depicted in this book, is imaginary, and
sad. But she herself is enchanting. We see her in contrasting
modes: dressed for a party, looking elegant, even sexy, if
always a shade withdrawn, and in the cockpit of her plane,
wearing her oil-smeared flying suit, totally hands on and
doing all her own maintenance work. Her total expertise
as a pilot, the beautiful voice in which she sang as she
took off – everything about her is head-turning.
Taking his cue from his principal character Uwe Timm,
in this bid for the German Book Prize, has performed an
unrivalled series of verbal aerobatics. Readers will have
learned before they open this issue whether his aviatrix
has flown him to the top.
Denmark); Podium (The Netherlands);
Albin Michel (France); Mondadori
(Italy); Le Lettere (Italy); Czytelnik
(Poland); Am Oved (Israel); Destino
(Spain); Kastaniotis (Greece); Ofoq
Publishers (Iran); Can Yayinlari (Turkey);
Text (Russia) – among others.
Rights to this book already
sold to: Mondadori (Italy)
Verlag Kiepenheuer &
Witsch GmbH & Co. KG
Bahnhofsvorplatz 1
50667 Cologne, Germany
Tel: +49 221 376 85 22
Contact: Iris Brandt
www.kiwi-verlag.de
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch
was founded in 1949 in Cologne by
two publishers from the Eastern Zone,
Gustav Kiepenheuer and Joseph Caspar
Witsch. The press’s early authors
included Joseph Roth, Heinrich Böll
and Erich Maria Remarque. Today
Kiepenheuer & Witsch continues to
publish leading contemporary German,
Austrian and Swiss writers, as well as
international authors in translation.
Its list includes Katja Lange-Müller,
Peter Härtling, Uwe Timm, Gabriel
García Márquez and John Banville.
Its non-fiction subjects cover sociology,
psychology, history and biography.
Kiepenheuer & Witsch is part of the
Holtzbrinck Group.
This novel is long-listed for the
German Book Prize.
Fiction 35
Konstanze von Schulthess
Nina Schenk Gräfin von
Stauffenberg. Ein Porträt
(Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg: A Portrait)
Pendo Verlag, April 2008, 204 pp. ISBN: 978-3-85842-652-9
A mother’s love – a wife’s loss – a woman’s strength
Written by Nina von Stauffenberg’s youngest daughter,
Konstanze, this is a portrait of the widow of the colonel who
attempted to assassinate Hitler in what became known as
the July Plot. The biography opens with a striking scene:
on 21 July 1944, a peaceful summer’s day, Nina calls her
two eldest sons to her and tells them that their father
‘made a mistake’ and so was executed during the night.
‘Providence protected our beloved Führer’, she adds, thus
not only bringing them the news of their father’s death but
also destroying their perception of him: no longer a brave
officer, but a traitor. The boys wouldn’t find out until the end
of the war that their father was in fact a hero, and that their
mother had lied to them to protect them.
© Dominik von Schulthess
The Nazis’ ‘Sippenhaft’ policy, whereby all family members
were held liable for crimes or treason perpetrated by one
member, meant that Nina knew that she, her children,
and many other members of their extended family would
be arrested and questioned, and possibly executed. The
Gestapo came for Nina two days later, and there began
‘Recommended as an excellent
introduction to German opposition
to Hitler, from a position of intimate
proximity but with sufficient
distance – most readable.’
– Neue Zürcher Zeitung
42 NON-Fiction
Konstanze von Schulthess
is the youngest daughter of Nina
Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg,
the wife of Claus Schenk Graf von
Stauffenberg, the man who attempted
to assassinate Hitler. Konstanze von
Schulthess was born in prison, as
her mother was arrested after the
assassination attempt. Together with
the other members of her family,
Konstanze spent her childhood in the
house of her grandmother in Lautlingen
and in Bamberg. Since 1965 she has
been living in Switzerland. She is
married and has four children.
The Netherlands; Portugal; Poland.
almost a year of solitary confinement, first in SS prisons,
then in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and finally in
hospitals. During all this time Nina was pregnant with her
fifth child, to whom she gave birth while still imprisoned,
not knowing if the child would be taken away from her, or
if she herself would be executed once the child was born.
If Nina’s 1944-45 story forms the core of this biography,
it is by no means the only material included. The author
traces her parents’ childhoods, their courtship and their
marriage relationship, and also brings in the stories of her
grandparents and other relatives, among them Nina’s sisterin-law, a Jewish test pilot so valued by the Nazis that she
was given equal status with Aryans, and her mother who,
having passed through Ravensbrück, died of typhus in a
camp in Matzkau in February 1945.
This is the first account of any of the wives of men
connected with the July Plot, and it well deserved
to be set down.
Lars Schultze-Kossack
Literarische Agentur Kossack GbR
Cäcilienstraße 14
D-22301 Hamburg
Tel: + 49-40-27163828
Contact: Lars Schultze-Kossack
www.mp-litagency.com
The Literarische Agentur Kossack
is a literary agency in Hamburg
which represents the foreign rights
of the Pendo Verlag. The agency also
handles the rights for other publishing
companies such as marebuchverlag,
Rotbuch and Fahrenheit. In addition it
acts on behalf of about eighty authors
of fiction, non-fiction and children’s
books. The agency was founded in 1995.
Founded in 1971, Pendo Verlag
is owned by Piper Verlag and run
independently by Doris Janhsen. Pendo
publishes German and international
fiction (such as Catalin Dorian Florescu,
Urs Schaub, Kurt Vonnegut, Danny
Scheinmann, Johano Strasser and Rajaa
Alsanea). The non-fiction list features
political books and works on selfmanagement, psychology and health.
Pendo titles are often on Germany’s
lists of bestsellers.
‘She writes as a daughter, not as
an academic, and her succinct tone
dealing with such powerful material
takes hold of the reader.’
– Der Spiegel
Michael Wallner
Die Zeit des Skorpions
(The Time of the Scorpion)
cbt Verlag, September 2008, 320 pp. ISBN: 978-3-570-16001-5
(For readers 12+)
What does tomorrow hold?
The time is the near future, the settings Italy and Germany.
Climate change and man’s exploitation of nature’s resources
have caused ecological imbalance. Desert is covering most
of southern Europe and is expanding further, swallowing up
cities, towns and landscapes. On the north side of the Alps,
a natural barrier to the spread of the desert, tropical climate
is maintaining a landscape rich in vegetation and food.
Power lies with those who can control the supply of water.
The story starts when the main character, fourteen-year-old
Tonia Raffainer, witnesses the death of her father during
a sand storm, in which her family’s home collapses. Left to
fend for herself, she witnesses a Tuareg warrior talking to
the local priest and is instantly drawn to his appearance.
But, understanding that the Tuareg would never accept a girl
in their group, she becomes ‘Antonio’, shaves her hair, and
dresses in her father’s clothes. The rest of the book describes
her many adventures, ending in the devastated city of Rome,
where, near the doors of the Vatican, she and her group
are attacked by ‘Fliegenkinder’ (fly children), who creep
out from the stones and start feasting on their living flesh.
© Bettina Stöß
Michael Wallner
was born in Graz, Austria, in 1958.
He has worked as an actor and director
and now lives in Berlin. In 2006
Luchterhand published his bestselling
April in Paris, a major international
success with translation rights being
sold to twenty-two countries.
April in Paris (2006)
Italy (Bompiani)
Monks from the Vatican save them, and they are nursed back
to health in the amazing oasis of the Vatican gardens. There
Tonia bathes in a spring under a waterfall for the first time in
her life, and is caught by her friend Dula, whose relationship
to her has changed from innocent friendship between boys
(as he supposed) to physical attraction.
Of course we are only a little way along the line at this
stage. A mysterious square cube adorned with the emblem
of a black scorpion, gigantic caves filled with water
which could save life in southern Europe, an explosion,
an earthquake, a shifting of the earth’s plates – these
are only a few of the props and spectacles in this weird,
post-catastrophic musical.
The style of writing is clear, depicting realistically the
setting, actions and circumstances without the use of
teenage language or any unusual rhetorical devices.
It conveys feelings and nature’s magic through actions
and precise descriptions, and in doing so paints a
frightening picture of tomorrow’s possible world.
cbt Verlag, Verlagsgruppe Random
House GmbH
Neumarkter Str. 28
Tel: +49 89 4136-3106
E-mail:
[email protected]
Contact: Eva-Maria Gold
www.randomhouse.de/cbjugendbuch
cbt Verlag
has been publishing literature for
young readers since 1835. Today the
firm offers a multifaceted program of
high-quality books for children and
young adults: picture books, delightfully
designed pre-reading and first-reading
books, page-turners and literary fiction,
informative non-fiction and creative
activity books.
On April in Paris:
‘Think Alan Furst with a different sort of hero, and a darker, more visceral edge.’
– Booklist
‘Wallner’s harrowing debut, a love story of sorts though there’s little romance,
rings with authenticity.’ – Publisher’s Weekly
‘The whole story is excellently told, an enthralling book in the best sense
of the word.’ – Hessischer Rundfunk
CHILDREN’s and young adults’ 29
Benedict Wells
Becks letzter Sommer
(Becks’s Last Summer)
Diogenes Verlag, September 2008, 464 pp. ISBN: 978 3 257 06676 0
Friendship, girls and rock ‘n’ roll
The period of this outstanding debut novel is a fateful
summer in the late 1990s, excellently described. Its principal
setting is Munich, its anti-hero is the thirty-seven-year-old
teacher and failed musician Robert Beck, frustrated with his
job and irritated by the steadily increasing eccentricity of
his closest friend Charlie Aguobe, a coarsely-spoken German
African hypochondriac who regales him with stories of
cancer, Aids, tumours and the looming inevitability of death.
© Regine Mosimann / Diogenes Verlag
Distraction is offered now and then by day-dreams of the
nubile Anna Lind, object of fantasy for students and teachers
alike. But the real catalysts for change in Beck’s life present
themselves in the characters of Lara, a young and ambitious
waitress, and Rauli, the seventeen-year-old who has recently
moved to Munich from Lithuania and quickly becomes an
outsider within the school. Discovering the boy playing
his own Fender Strat guitar in the back room after music
class one day, Beck realises that he has encountered a true
musical genius.
Benedict Wells
was born in Munich in 1984 and spent
his early childhood in Switzerland.
At the age of six he began his journey
through three Bavarian boarding
schools. Following his graduation
from high school in 2003, he moved
to Berlin where he decided not to go
to university. Instead, he set down to
write his first novel. He made a living
doing odd jobs, most recently working
on the editorial board of a talk show.
This debut offering is already garnering
warm praise and sales.
34 Fiction
But Rauli himself is far from an open book. From the
revolver he is rumoured to carry to the yellow slips of
paper he consistently and secretly writes on, he remains
a perplexing mystery to Herr Beck, as he calls his mentor.
Beck meanwhile spends much of the rest of his time trying
to win the beguiling Lara, despite the fact that he is a
decade older than she and unable to keep up with her
youthful exuberance. Meanwhile Charlie is compelled to
check himself into a clinic to deal with his substance abuse
problems and other issues, and Beck, guilty at having failed
to take alarm earlier, agrees when the time comes to drive
him to see his mother in Turkey, a road trip which Rauli
joins and which provides many of the surreal and wonderful
moments that make this book so engaging.
As the novel closes there are many disappointments marring
the dreams of these characters, including Charlie’s being
killed in a plane crash at a time when he had finally made
peace with his fear of death and disease. But the book itself
is the reverse of depressing. Like the musical genius of Rauli
himself, it is a gem waiting to be discovered.
Diogenes Verlag AG
Sprecherstr. 8
8032 Zurich, Switzerland
Tel: +41 44 254 8511
Contact: Susanne Bauknecht
www.diogenes.ch
‘The most touching book to be
published this summer. Melancholy,
funny, deep. A book you just want
to hug. Congratulations!!!’
– Buchhandlung Graff
Diogenes Verlag
was founded in Zurich in 1952 by
Daniel Keel and Rudolf C. Bettschart.
One of the leading international
publishing houses, it numbers among
its authors Alfred Andersch, Friedrich
Dürrenmatt, Urs Widmer, Patricia
Highsmith, Donna Leon, Bernhard
Schlink and Patrick Süskind. Children’s
authors include Tatjana Hauptmann,
Ute Krause, Friedrich Karl Waechter
and Tomi Ungerer.

Robert Musil – Literatur und Politik

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