Gert Hofmann

Körler Kıssası

With one voice, the six blind men from Breughel's famous sixteenth-century painting "The Parable of the Blind" narrate their adventures on the day they are to be painted

The Parable of the Blind

Michael Hofmann

Eric Mace-Tessler

Our Philosopher

Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Einstein... all praised the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession, and an aphorist and satirist on the sly. In Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, novelist Gert Hofmann weaves a wondrous fictionalized tale of Lichtenberg's real-life romance with the model of beauty and sweetness, Maria Stechard, a flower seller he meets one day near his laboratory in Gottingen. The greater part of what I commit to paper is untrue, and the best of it is fiction! exclaims Lichtenberg, our hunchbacked hero. His daily life of wrestling with death, of electricity machines and exploding gases is plunged into new passion the day he encounters the little Stechard girl: Something is found that was lost for a long time. Soon he teaches her to read and write, she helps him keep house... and then? Colored with Lichtenberg's humorous, enlightening meditations on life, death, and everything in-between, Hofmann works a subtle magic in this unusual fable-of-awakening about the transience of human attachments and the resilience of the human spirit.

Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl

A high-water mark of postwar German literature, a profoundly skeptical meditation on the fragility of human communities and the pitfalls and contradictions of making art. A knocking on the barn door drags us out of our sleep. No, the knocking isn't inside us, it's outside, where the other people are. With that, six blind beggars--ragged, profane, irascible--find themselves waking to yet another grim day in the dark. Today, however, something is different. Today these men have an appointment with a painter: they have been hired as models, to pose for Pieter Bruegel's grotesque masterpiece-in-the-making. With tremendous verbal ingenuity and black humor, Gert Hofmann's novel follows this tattered sextet's shambling progress across a landscape in 16th century Flanders, peopled by half-heard voices and unseen dangers, towards their ultimate encounter with the great, capricious artist, and (perhaps) their own immortality.

Rachel MagShamhráin

Marko Pajević

Michael Shields

New essays on poetical and theoretical responses to the Holocaust's rupture of German and European civilization.

Crisis and Creativity

German and European Poetics After the Holocaust

A child's-eye view of a family in decline, Gert Hofmann's Luck mixes humour and suspense with a heartbreaking pathos. This is the story of a nuclear family- father, mother, daughter and son. But all is not as it seems, for the mother is in love with Herr Herkenrath, and now father and son will have to leave home. Or will they? Mother sits in her room, waiting for her new man to arrive and her old one to go. Father sits in his room, planning another novel. The little sister is the lucky one- she gets to stay at home. But the son won't have to put up with Herr Herkenrath's annoying habits and his smelly feet. So maybe he's lucky to be going. Only time will tell, but time is running out. The removal van is on its way.

Luck

Juliana Albuquerque

The late 18th century is characterized by two crucial events: the rise of Goethe as a dominating literary figure and the emergence of Kant’s critical philosophy and its productive reception not only in the philosophical but also literary discourse of the time. While the Tübingen School concreatively adopted Kant’s philosophy as a system of ideas, they also critically responded to its intellectualising impulse by positing the equiprimordiality of world and Self, of art and reason. Adhering to the self-critical impulse of Kant’s philosophy by positing the equiprimordiality of both the empirical world and the intelligible subject, and trying to overcome the “chorismos” between them through the classicist model of aesthetic Bildung, they argued for the co-extensiveness of the reality of both philosophy and literature. The authors investigate how the latent antagonism between these divergent traditions of the so-called Goethezeit creates the thrust behind the intellectual firework of divergent literary and philosophical discourses from around 1800, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century.

Re-interpreting a German Discourse

Anti/Idealism

The narrator and his wife, whose marriage is shaky, are stranded in a desolate Sicilian village and are taken, by a menacing guide, on a tour of poverty, misery, grotesquery, and morbidity

The Spectacle at the Tower

Before the Rainy Season

Kasilda Bedenk

("Der Richter und sein Henker", "Der Verdacht", "Das Versprechen", "Die Panne") : A-diplomska naloga

Friedrich Dürrenmatt als Kriminalschriftsteller

Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Award

The Film Explainer

Snježana Zorić

Presence of the Body provides an interdisciplinary forum (including literary, performative, philosophical and anthropological approaches) for the dialogue between theory and practice about the impact of the body on human awareness in the fields of art, writing, meditative practice, and performance.

Gert Hofmann

Books

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