Michael Hofmann

Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation ) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos―an unforgettably compelling masterpiece―tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies.” In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a translator: “Hofmann’s translation is invaluable―it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once ‘loyal’ and ‘beautiful.’”

Kairos

Patrick Süskind

A boy's village childhood with all the traditional attributes - father, mother, brother, sister, a house on a lake, tree-climbing, going to the races, music lessons, a bicycle, a crush on a girl in the class - is bedevilled by the mystifying appearances of the eccentric Mr. Sommer. Moving through the landscape in silent haste, like a man possessed, with his empty rucksack and his long, odd-looking walking stick, Mr Sommer runs like a black thread through the boys days.

The Story of Mr Sommer

Herta Müller

In Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign, several young people leave the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects, but they must face betrayal, suicide, and the reality that even the strongest must bend to the oppressors or resist and die.

A Novel

The Land of Green Plums

Joseph Roth

"In the small town of Progrody, Nissen Piczenik makes his living as a respected coral merchant. Despite his knowledge of coral, Nissen has never seen the sea. When a visiting sailor offers to take Nissen to Odessa, he eagerly accepts. But upon his return to Progrody, Nissen finds that a new coral merchant has moved into a neighboring town and is gaining popularity. As his customers dwindle, life takes an evil twist for Nissen Progrody. And the final decider of his fate may be the devil himself."--P. [4] of cover.

The Leviathan (New Directions Pearls)

Markus Werner

In a small town in Switzerland, Franz—ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends—is being haunted by his recently deceased father, Klement. In life, Franz was caught cheating on his wife and defrocked, after which Klement never spoke to him again. In death, Klement visits his son in the form of a frog in the throat, choking him, yes, but also giving voice to an old dairy farmer devoted to the old ways, forever railing against his son and the whole modern mess he represents.

The same can be said of this novel, in which these two voices clash, harmonize, and ultimately offer up all the mutual recognition and incomprehension that is family life. A miniature tragicomic masterpiece, Markus Werner’s second novel is as bursting with life as a Dickens novel: not only Franz’s high-strung shenanigans and the father’s settled life among the cattle, but the lives of his sister and brother and the land all around.

As in all of Werner’s work, the world looks grim (“I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many and each evening I say: Starting tomorrow I’m going to get a grip on myself”) but never less than comic—a view captured marvelously in Michael Hofmann’s vivid translation.

The Frog in the Throat

Gert Hofmann

Eric Mace-Tessler

Our Philosopher

The Overlook Press

Right And Left

Emperor's Tomb

One Lark, One Horse

This is a companion volume to Joseph Roth's 'What I Saw', his critically acclaimed reports from Berlin. The book is a collection of writing on his time in Paris from 1925 after he left the Weimar Republic.

Reports from France, 1925-39

The White Cities

Rilke, Sachs, Brecht, Celan: German has produced some of the giants of 20th century European poetry. In this new selection, complete with many new translations, Michael Hofmann guides us through the poems, poets and themes of German verse. Meticulously researched but eminently approachable, The Faber Book of Twentieth Century German Poems is an essential new addition to any poetry bookshelf.'Michael Hofmann has a skeptical intelligence, an observant eye, a compulsion to speak the unspeakable, and the useful wariness of the displaced person.' Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books'It is probably impossible to produce poetry of this quality that is tuned more precisely to the timbre of the present than Michael Hofmann's. Rapture is the only adequate response.' Geoff Dyer, Guardian

The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems

This groundbreaking anthology will serve as the standard for years to come. Editor Michael Hofmann has assembled brilliant translations of the major German poets, from Rilke and Brecht to Durs Grunbein and Jan Wagner, in an approachable, readable, and endlessly interesting collection. Here we find poetry as a living counter-force to socio-political reality; poetry of dissent and fear and protest; poetry of private griefs and musics. From the subtlety and elegance of Brecht, to the extraordinary jargon-glooms of Gottfried Benn, to the oblique and straightforward responses to the country's villainous history, to the bitter, cleansed, and haunted poetry of the postwar years, the anthology ends with a reunified country looking at itself and its neighbors in new ways. This is an essential and timely collection of verse from a tumultuous, violent, tragic, and hopeful century, written in the language of those who were at the heart of the matter.

An Anthology

Twentieth-century German Poetry

James Lasdun

Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the great works in classical literature, and a primary source for our knowledge of much of classic mythology, in which the relentless theme of transformation stands as a primary metaphor for the often cataclysmic dynamics of life itself. For this book, British poets Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun have invited more than forty leading English-language poets to create their own idiomatic contemporary versions of some of the most famous and notorious myths from the Metamorphoses. Apollo and Daphne, Pyramus and Thisbe, Proserpina, Marsyas, Medea, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice--these and many other immortal tales are given fresh and startling life in exciting new versions. The contributors--among them Fleur Adcock, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Joseph, Kenneth Koch, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Robert Pinsky, Frederick Seidel, Charles Simic, and C. K. Williams--constitute an impressive roster of today's major poets. After Ovid is a powerful re-envisioning of a fundamental work of literature as well as a remarkable affirmation of the current state of poetry in English.

New Metamorphoses

After Ovid

"'Tell me if you can why a grown man in his mid-thirties, namely me, should have to live with an instrument that's a constant handicap to him?! Humanly, socially, sexually, musically, in traffic - nothing but a handicap!'"

The Double-bass

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.

The Parable of the Blind

Arnd Beise

Jens Birkmeyer

25 Jahre Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands

Diese bebende, zähe, kühne Hoffnung

Jochen Vogt

Martin Rector

Der siebte Band umkreist Peter Weiss' Konzeption einer politisch engagierten Literatur in ihrer Beziehung zu wichtigen Weg- und Zeitgenossen. Ausgangspunkt ist die "Ästhetik des Widerstands". Nach einer generellen relecture des Romans unter dem Aspekt der Entfremdung (Andreas Krause) wird die Mentorenrolle der Romanfiguren Max Hodann und Bertolt Brecht analysiert (Achim Kessler, Maria Ernst). Über Weiss hinaus weisen die Überlegungen zur Aufrufung eines kollektiven Gedächtnisses in Brechts Exillyrik (Jochen Vogt) sowie zu Heiner Müllers Theater des Krieges und der Gewalt (Michael Hofmann). Ausdrücklich auf Weiss berufen sich Volker Braun mit einem grundsätzlichen poetologischen Manifest und Christoph Hein in seinen Dankesworten zur Verleihung des Peter Weiss-Preises. Eine unveröffentlichte Aufzeichung von Weiss über ein gruppentherapeutisches Gespräch aus dem Jahre 1960 und kritische Anmerkungen zur Renaissance der Totalitarismustheorie (Alfons Söllner) sowie Rezensionen zu Neuerscheinungen runden den Band ab.

Peter Weiss Jahrbuch 7

Şeyda Ozil

Yasemin Dayıoğlu-Yücel

This volume follows on from the previous volume on 50 years of Turkish labour migration in Germany. It points out the continuity and processuality that have continued since the anniversary. An interdisciplinary range of contributions looks at German-Turkish negotiations in the context of economic and diplomatic history, the apparent contradiction between committed literature and literary aesthetics in migration literature, the depiction of Turks and Turkey in German reading books, guestworker migration as a motive in Turkish films, theatre work as an arena for protest and communicative actions in the light of the experience of marginalisation.

51 Jahre türkische Gastarbeitermigration in Deutschland

Essay from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - Region: USA, grade: 65 (UK system), University of Kent, language: English, abstract: The end of the cold war in 1989 and 1990 appeared without warning. The upheavals that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall were dramatic. Within less than one year since November 9, 1989 the three Baltic states declared their independence from the Soviet Union (S.U.) as did Uzbekistan, Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus. Finally, on October 3, 1990 Germany announced its reunification. At the beginning of 1992, the S.U. ceased to exist. In place of the Soviet empire, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was established, bringing together eleven of the fifteeni constituent republics of the S.U. Having constituted the dominant republic of the S.U. and being regarded as its successor state, the Russian Federation had suddenly lost its status as a superpower and its role as a competitor, ideological and political, of the United States of America (USA/U.S.). However, and 15 years afer the end of the S.U., this essay will argue, the USA is not in a position to influence Russia’s domestic behaviour in a way that is coherent with its liberal foreign policy doctrine. Strategic interests and internal as well as external constraints are the reasons why the U.S. has abandoned many of its foreign policy objectives in regard to Russia. In order to develop this argument, the first part of the paper will shortly outline U.S.-Russia relations since the end of the cold war. Then, the current underpinnings of U.S. policy towards Russia will be analysed. Particularly, the reasons for America’s non-engagement approach will be addressed

US foreign policy towards the Russian Federation: The constrained Empire

Follows the eminent European newspaper correspondent's near-prophetic perceptions of a European order that would enable a transcendental world of beauty and promise. Reprint.

Michael Hofmann

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