Books in the The German List - (Seagull Titles CHUP) series

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? Shouldn‿t poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead?   In the form of a collage or “photosynthesis,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 “Fÿhrer‿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, “There 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?   In Kong‿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 Kong‿s nose, the voice of the author‿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 Kluge‿s lifelong pursuit, and this magnificent collection tells stories of people as well of things.   First in a series of Kluge‿s Chronicles forthcoming from Seagull Books, Kong‿s Finest Hour will delight those familiar with his writing as well as introduce readers to the brilliance of one of Germany‿s greatest living writers. Â

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.

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 fates‿both already known and yet to unfold‿and the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. Alexander Kluge‿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 perspective‿“calibratedâ€?‿against this historical monstrosity. Kluge‿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. “The moment they come into existence, monstrous crimes have a unique ability,â€? Bauer once said, “to 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

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.

A series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria.

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.

IN

Born in the former East Germany, Volker Braun is a humane, witty, brave, and disappointed poet. In the East, his poetry upheld the voice of the individual imagination and identified with a utopian possibility that never became reality. This is a selection of poems from the distinguished, half-century-long career of German poet Volker Braun.

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.

Drawn from the author's experiences as a political prisoner and as a refugee, this novel features Rasul Hamid who describes the eight different ways he fled his home in Iraq and the eight different ways he has failed to find a way home. It is a literary looking glass between two cultures, between two places, and between East and West.

Out of the many tragedies that almost seem to define the first decade of our century, the author has fashioned a richly woven, multilayered tapestry that not only explores the human side but brings out the cultural, historical, social, and political context within which the tragedies occur.

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.

One night in the middle of winter, as deep snow covers the mountains and forests of Austria, a doctor is crossing a ridge from Traich to Foding to see a patient. He stumbles over a body in the darkness and fears it is a corpse. But it's not a corpse at all - in fact, it's wooden-legged Victor Halfwit, collapsed, but still very much alive.

A fire broke out in the coal seams of their town years ago, and the flames are still smoldering underground. Margaret and Fritzi are the two sisters who are the last remaining youth of this vanishing town. Their inheritance is nothing but an abandoned swathe of land ruled by devastation.

Eich, a thirty-something freelance journalist, is researching a story on the radicals of the previous generation in Germany. His path keeps crossing with Nele, a young member of a left-wing group of student activists who are resistant to the increasing control and surveillance of all spheres of life by state and commercial institutions.

A decaying apartment building in post-Wall Berlin is home to Hell, a young woman with a passion for martial arts. When Hell's neighbor disappears she sets out across the city in search of her. In the course of her quest, she falls in love with a bank robber, confronts her own dark memories, and ends up saving more than just her missing neighbor.

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.

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as one of the major writers of our time. This collection includes seven stories that capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision - often compared to Kafka and Musil - commenting on a corrupted world.

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 there‿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 politicians‿the human greed, envy, and fear that fuels the global economy. A modern, but moral-less fable, Money, Money, Money! is shot through with Enzensberger‿s trademark erudition, wit, and humanist desire to cut through jargon and forearm his readers against obscurantism. Â

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.