Argues for a third way, a mode of thought that doesn't insist on these divisive either/ors. Neither an active refusal to engage with the world nor a consistent strategy of resistance, tarrying, as defined by Vogl, defers, multiplies, and suspends the strictures of decision-making.
Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grÿnbein. In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grÿnbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since he began to perceive his own position within the past of his nation, his linguistic community, and his family: How is it possible that history can determine the individual poetic imagination and segregate it into private niches? Shouldnâ¿t poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead?  In the form of a collage or âphotosynthesis,â? in image and text, Grÿnbein lets the fundamental opposition between poetic license and almost overwhelming bondage to history appear in an exemplary way. From the seeming trifle of a stamp with the portrait of Adolf Hitler, he moves through the phenomenon of the âFÿhrerâ¿s streetsâ? and into the inferno of aerial warfare. In the end, Grÿnbein argues that we are faced with the powerlessness of writing and the realization, valid to this day, that comes from confronting history. As he muses, âThere is something beyond literature that questions all writing.â?
In a world full of devils, the giant ape Kong defends what he loves the most. But who and what is this undomesticated animal? Might it reside within us? As we tread confidently, is this where the earth opens up beneath us? Â In Kongâ¿s Finest Hour, Alexander Kluge explores anew the accessible spaces where Kong dwells within us and in our million-year-old past. The more than two hundred stories contained in this volume form a chronicle of connections that together survey these spaces using diverse perspectives. These include stories about the folds of Kongâ¿s nose, the voice of the authorâ¿s mother, the poet Heinrich von Kleist and Jack the Ripper, the indestructability of the political, and the supercontinent Pangaea that once unified the earth. Dissolving theory into storytelling has been Klugeâ¿s lifelong pursuit, and this magnificent collection tells stories of people as well of things. Â First in a series of Klugeâ¿s Chronicles forthcoming from Seagull Books, Kongâ¿s Finest Hour will delight those familiar with his writing as well as introduce readers to the brilliance of one of Germanyâ¿s greatest living writers. Â
Reinhard Jirgl's strikingly individual novel The Fire Above, the Mountain Below demonstrates that he is not only unorthodox in his approach to language, but also difficult to pin down in terms of any genre. Weaving together elements of crime story, Cold War espionage, family tragedy, and a dystopian future, he creates a tapestry of fragile humanity and menacing inhumanity. The investigation of a series of gruesome killings takes a detective inspector into explorations of a secret intelligence programme in former East Germany and the role of a family with a tragic history. The more is uncovered, the more disorienting it becomes, and the reader is drawn into a complex web of discovery and suppression.
Offers an examination of the psychology of National Socialism. In this title, each story presents a snapshot of a personal and historical turning point in the life of the narrator, beginning with childhood anti-Semitism and moving to a youthful embrace - and an ultimate rejection - of Nazi ideology.
Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of postwar German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. Nearly twenty years after her death, during an estate sale in Vienna, fifteen episodes of the Viennese radio drama The Radio Family were discovered. This book features these fifteen scripts.
A novel that follows the life of a man who, like the author, lived in the Lodz ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It gives expression to the author's perception of himself and the world and to his tireless attempt to bring his own tone of linguistic brevity, irony, and balance to German relations.
Introduces us to W, a mere hangeron in East Berlin's postmodern underground literary scene. This title offers a black comedy about state power and the seductions of surveillance. Its vision seems especially relevant in the world of cameras on every train, bus, and corner.
Growing up in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a young Kurdish boy named Kerim has ample opportunity to witness the murderous repression that defined the era for thousands of Iraqis. This book follows Kerim from the fading memories of his childhood to his life running his family's roadside restaurant.
A book about bitter fatesâ¿both already known and yet to unfoldâ¿and the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. Alexander Klugeâ¿s work has long grappled with the Third Reich and its aftermath, and the extermination of the Jews forms its gravitational center. Kluge is forever reminding us to keep our present catastrophes in perspectiveâ¿âcalibratedâ?â¿against this historical monstrosity. Klugeâ¿s newest work is a book about bitter fates, both already known and yet to unfold. Above all, it is about the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. These forty-eight stories of justice and injustice are dedicated to the memory of Fritz Bauer, a determined fighter for justice and district attorney of Hesse during the Auschwitz Trials. âThe moment they come into existence, monstrous crimes have a unique ability,â? Bauer once said, âto ensure their own repetition.â? Kluge takes heed, and in these pages reminds us of the importance of keeping our powers of observation and memory razor sharp. Â
Richly imagined and recounted in vivid prose of extraordinary beauty, this book is a stunning illustration of Ransmayrâ¿s talent for imbuing a captivating tale with intense metaphorical, indeed metaphysical force. The worldâ¿s most powerful man, Qiánlóng, emperor of China, invites the famous eighteenth-century clockmaker Alister Cox to his court in Beijing. There, in the heart of the Forbidden City, the Englishman and his assistants are to build machines that mark the passing of time as a child or a condemned man might experience it and that capture the many shades of happiness, suffering, love, and loss that come with that passing. Mystified by the rituals of a rigidly hierarchical society dominated by an unimaginably wealthy, god-like ruler, Cox musters all his expertise and ingenuity to satisfy the emperorâ¿s desires. Finally, Qiánlóng, also known by the moniker Lord of Time, requests the construction of a clock capable of measuring eternityâ¿a perpetuum mobile. Seizing this chance to realize a long-held dream and honor the memory of his late beloved daughter, yet conscious of the impossibility of his task, Cox sets to work. As the court is suspended in a never-ending summer, festering with evil gossip about the monster these foreigners are creating, the Englishmen wonder if they will ever escape from their gilded cage. More than a meeting of two men, one isolated by power, the other by grief, this is an exploration of mortality and a virtuoso demonstration that storytelling alone can truly conquer time. Â
A unique and modern approach to money, wealth, greed, and financial ignorance presented via a story of a family in the Munich suburbs. The Federmanns live a pleasant but painfully normal life in the Munich suburbs. All that the three children really know about money is that thereâ¿s never enough of it in their family.  Every so often, their impish Great-Aunt Fé descends on the city. After repeated cycles of boom and bust, profligacy and poverty, the grand old lady has become enormously wealthy and lives alone in a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva. But what does Great-Aunt Fé want from the Federmanns, her only surviving relatives? This time, she invites the children to tea at her luxury hotel where she spoils, flummoxes, and inspires them. Dismayed at their ignorance of the financial ways of the world, she gives them a crash course in economics that piques their curiosity, unsettles their parents, and throws open a whole new world. The young Federmanns are for once taken seriously and together they try to answer burning questions: Where does money come from? Why are millionaires and billionaires never satisfied? And why are those with the most always showered with more?  In this rich volume, the renowned poet, translator, and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger turns his gimlet eye on the mechanisms and machinations of banks and politiciansâ¿the human greed, envy, and fear that fuels the global economy. A modern, but moral-less fable, Money, Money, Money! is shot through with Enzensbergerâ¿s trademark erudition, wit, and humanist desire to cut through jargon and forearm his readers against obscurantism. Â
Paul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post - World War II German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. This title collects their letters written between 1948 and 1961.
For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognized in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although she is an internationally recognized playwright, Jelinek's plays are difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume, which includes "Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel," "The Merchant's Contracts" and "Charges (The Supplicants)" all the more valuable. In "Rechnitz," a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual historical event that took place near the Austrian/Hungarian 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. In "Charges (The Supplicants)," Jelinek offers a powerful analysis of the plight of refugees, from ancient times to the present. She responds to the immeasurable suffering among those fleeing death, destruction, and political suppression in their home countries and, drawing on sources as widely separated in time and intent as up-to-the-minute blog postings and Aeschylus's "The Supplicants," Jelinek asks what refugees want, how we as a society view them, and what political, moral, and personal obligations they impose on us.
A diary-like sequence of poems from one of Austria's best-known contemporary voices. Exploring longing, lust for life, aging, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, études is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayröcker's almost daily entries give us a unique view into the interplay between desire and her motivation for writing. In Mayröcker's case, she writes both to keep a vanished world present and to exploit the possibilities of being present for constant experimentation. The poems in this volume are not only studies of how the mind works, moving from fragment to fragment, but also experiments with techniques of repetition, typography, collage, and quotation. Mayröcker transforms the humble page into spaces of radical openness. After all, she says, a poem is that which "opens everything up." Each poem is date-stamped, and each date acts as a kind of permission for Mayröcker to pour in everything from notes on doctor's visits to gorgeously structured elegies to obsessively repeating fragments of memory that act upon the whole like bits of recurring melody. Rarely before has the intimate process of writing been so exquisitely laid bare than in études. Traversing the boundaries of literary forms with Mayröcker's distinctive style, this important volume strikes an admirable balance between playfulness and serious inquiry.
"The essay ... is based on a speech, given at the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich in October 2017"--Title page verso.
Originally published as Der fliegende Berg, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2006.
In March 2010, Robert Menasse went to Brussels to begin researching a novel about the European Union. Instead of producing a work of fiction, however, his extended stay in Brussels resulted in The European Courier, a text in which he examines the European community from its beginnings in the transnational "Montanunion" (European Coal and Steel Community, 1951) to the current "financial crisis" of the European Union. In the course of his analysis, Menasse focuses on the institutional structures and forces that work to advance--or obstruct--the European project and its goal of a truly postnational European democracy. Given the internal tensions among the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council, Menasse argues that what is frequently misunderstood as a financial crisis is, in fact, a political one. As Menasse claims in The European Courier, "Either the Europe of nation-states will perish or the project of transcending the nation-states will."
When Keith Stapperpfenning and his family give their grandfather the trip of a lifetime - an all-expenses-paid holiday to any destination in the world - the eccentric old man arbitrarily chooses China, and he asks Keith to accompany him. But when his grandfather dies unexpectedly, Keith is left to continue the farce alone.
A series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria.
Almost twenty years after the fall of the wall, the Kreuzberg district of Berlin has become unbearably trendy and deeply unappealing to Alina and Wolf. They move to Muggelsee, at the city's bucolic border. But there, Wolf finds himself increasingly strained by the triviality of his daily routine with Alina.
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