The German List – serie

Paul Celan (192070) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (192673) is recognized as one of postWorld War II German literature's most important novelists, poets and playwrights. It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful and passionate correspondence.Collected here for the first time in English are their letters written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with all the symptomatic disturbances and crises caused by their conflicting backgrounds and their hard-to-reconcile designs for living-as a woman, as a man, as writers. In addition to the almost 200 letters, the volume includes an important exchange between Bachmann and Gisele Celan-Lestrange, who married Celan in 1951, as well as the letters between Paul Celan and Swiss writer Max Frisch, who was Bachmann's lover for four years. 'Wieland Hoban has worked with accuracy and determination to capture the nuances of style and register, which include oblique awkwardness (Celan) and self-assuredness (Bachmann), alongside infinite courage and astounding strength (Celan-Lestrange). The translation reads well, with just a slight edge of the original diction remaining to remind readers that we are witnessing a different time and place, and way of perceiving the world. . . . This is an important addition tot he work in translation of two major post-war writers.'- Times Literary Supplement'This book is highly recommended. You cannot possibly be disappointed by it, especially if you are familiar with these writers' literary output, each of which left the world a completely original, masterful, and highly influential body of work. The letters move from youthful heartbreak and poetical exuberance to the destructive later exchanges between two people who cannot trust one another although they are, until the end, drawn to each other. It's not a book you read and shelve. It's a book to read and reread, a book to treasure.'- Shigekuni. Read the lengthy, detailed and enligtening review of the book here.'Correspondence, rendered perfectly in English by Wieland Hoban, traces [Celan and Bachmann's] letters, telegrams, and book inscriptions to one another, color-coded and augmented by hundreds of footnotes. Like other volumes from Seagull Books, it's physically gorgeous, with a pleasingly compact trim size. Reading Correspondence feels like an indulgence. It also feels disorienting. The world of the letters and the world of their authors' real lives are askew in a sometimes jarring way, so that the emotional content of the letters reads almost as fiction.'- Aaron Belz, Books & Culture

I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I've liked too many men. Frank and refreshing, Brigitte Reimann's collected diaries provide a candid account of life in socialist Germany. With an upbeat tempo and amusing tone, I Have No Regrets contains detailed accounts of the author's love affairs, daily life, writing, and reflections. Like the heroines in her stories, Reimann was impetuous and outspoken, addressing issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the era of the German Democratic Republic. She followed the state's call for artists to leave their ivory towers and engage with the people, moving to the new town of Hoyerswerda to work part-time at a nearby industrial plant and run writing classes for the workers. Her diaries and letters provide a fascinating parallel to her fictional writing. By turns shocking, passionate, unflinching, and bitter--but above all life-affirming--they offer an unparalleled insight into what life was like during the first decades of the GDR.

Although Elfriede Jelinek is an internationally recognised playwright, her plays are difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume all the more valuable. In Rechnitz, a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual event that took place near the AustrianHungarian border town of Rechnitz. In The Merchant's Contracts, Jelinek brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated and bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. And in Charges (The Supplicants), Jelinek responds to the immeasurable suffering among refugees fleeing death, destruction and political suppression, and asks what refugees want, how we as a society view them, and what political, moral and personal obligations they impose on us.

A poignant memoir about cultural differences told by an international rights veteran in the book publishing industry.Traveling from the Silicon Valley through the college towns of Berkeley and Stanford, Loving at a Distance is a touching memoir that describes a European bibliophile’s experiences in the high-tech sectors of California. Living on two different continents is always a big challenge for a family. In a pandemic, however, that challenge becomes almost insurmountable.  An aging German grandmother, Petra Hardt finds that her regular journeys across the Atlantic to visit her children and grandchildren in California aren’t really helping her understand the Californian way of life and work. With self-irony and laconism, she details the connections and confusions between generations, exploring how different lifestyles and attitudes have affected her relationships. Her relatable experience of trying to bond with loved ones across distance is one shared by millions of other families around the world.  The personal impressions and observations are complemented by flashbacks to the author’s career in the international book trade. Why were the business trips to Beijing, Beirut, and Kolkata so easy to manage, while living in California is so hard? Showing us the world through Hardt’s grandmotherly eyes, Loving at a Distance is a tender and lively memoir about different ways of living and working in the age of globalism.

A new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris.  In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine’s editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective.  In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries.  With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.