Böcker av Johannes Bobrowski

Johannes Bobrowski (1917-1965) is known as one of Germany's greatest writers. His first novel, set in a West Prussian village in 1874, tells the story of the narrator's grandfather, who plots and schemes to ruin the Jewish newcomer who has built a mill downstream from him. With splendid irony, Bobrowski describes the diverse characters of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and Germans who inhabit the village, and whose affairs mirror the larger history of Poland. As The Irish Times says, "Bobrowski has a marvelous ability to evoke the countryside and a vanished way of life... throughout the entire book there is a keen though understated element of humour, as well as a compelling, dream-like sense of fantasy."

A P.O.W. in Russia after World War II, Bobrowski (1917-1965) returned to his forever-changed native province, former East Prussia, in 1949. His lost homeland--which he called by the region's ancient name of Sarmartia--haunts all his work. Full of longing and an astonishing poetic beauty, the stories in Darkness and a Little Light are visionary elegies to vanished ways of life. Some of the stories, set in the nineteenth century or in the darkness of World War II, are directly threnodic. But underneath the tales relating the dreary, oversynthesized reality of East German life in the '50s and '60s linger traces of an older, more atmospheric world of nature and memory.

From Publishers WeeklyOriginally published in 1964, this first novel is almost a quasi-social history: the author has taken a minor incident in his own family's past--the time is 1874--and expanded it to dramatize the racial tension between the Germans and the native Poles of Western Prussia. Levin, a Jew, has the audacity to construct a mill downstream from the mill of a wealthy landowner, the narrator's grandfather. The latter, fearing competition, opens the sluice gates so that Levin's mill is destroyed. Levin takes the old man to court, but Grandfather cozies up to the German magistrates, suggesting that we Germans should stick together. The fight eventually exhausts Grandfather, mentally and physically. Bobrowski's rhetorical, labored writing, and the obscurity of the plot, only hint at his intentions. What does come across is a portrait of a closed, provincial society and rampant ethnocentrism that would plague the Germans well into the 20th century.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.