While We Were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer

 

While We Were Dreaming

by Clemens Meyer

Translated by Katy Derbyshire

A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd with Angelika Patel

A Village in the Third Reich

by Julia Boyd 

with Angelika Patel

The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

The Passenger

by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

translated by Philip Boehm

                                

Whatever I've done in the past, he thought, looks different today than it did back then, because now my humanity is called into question, because I am a Jew...

In Love and War: "Stella" by Takis Würger

Stella

by Takis Würger

(translated from the German 

by Liesl Schillinger)

An enigmatic swansong: "The Invisible Land" by Hubert Mingarelli

The Invisible Land

Hubert Mingarelli (translated by Sam Taylor)

A Review

"La Quinta Sinfonia di Beethoven Recensita da E.T.A. Hoffmann" by Benedetta Saglietti

La Quinta Sinfonia di Beethoven Recensita da E.T.A. Hoffmann: 

Nel Regno dell'Infinito

by Benedetta Saglietti

A review

Alone in Berlin: "Red Pill" by Hari Kunzru

"Red Pill" by Hari Kunzru

A Review

Nazi Apocalypse: Joseph Roth's essays "On the End of the World"

Joseph Roth: On the End of the World

A book review

What use are my words against the guns, the loudspeakers, the murderers, the deranged ministers, the clueless diplomats, the stupid interviewers and journalists who interpret the voice of this world of Babel, muddied anyhow, via the drums of Nuremberg?

In sad resignation

Your Joseph Roth

My Heart Burns: E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sandman

 My Heart Burns...

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (translated by Christopher Moncrieff): Tale of an Obsession

Grim(m) tale? The Jew's Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

The Jew's Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848) was born into an aristocratic Catholic family near Munster and spent most of her life in rural Westphalia. She never married and rarely tasted city life. This notwithstanding it appears that she was well aware of the prevailing literary trends of the day and her apparently "limited" life experiences did not stop her from exploring deep philosophical issues in her works.

Take this strange novella - "The Jew's Beech". It is, ostensibly, a murder mystery inspired by true events - the unsolved murders of a forester and a Jewish moneylender - which were recorded in the archives of the author's family. The story itself however is just a pretext for an exploration of such themes as good and evil, the corruptibility of young minds and the stifling prejudices which, in a small community, can cloud the minds of even the best of people. 

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was primarily a poet and Die Judenbuche is her only piece of prose. For better or for worse, it is very much a poet's work. Let's start with the weaknesses first. A master storyteller could have made a nail-biting thriller out of this. Von Droste-Hülshoff however seems blissfully unconcerned about narrative conventions. Many facts are left unexplained, new characters appear with barely an introduction, the structure sometimes feels lopsided with flashbacks and flashforwards. Then there is the famously obscure ending, which lends itself to multiple interpretations and raises more questions than it answers. It leaves one wondering whether the author was being consciously obscure - a proto-(post)modernist, if you will - or whether she was merely unable to tie up the plot's loose ends. 

But in the novella's weaknesses lie also its strengths. The work is rich in allusion and metaphor - chief amongst them the striking image of the lone beech tree of the title. Although the book is firmly rooted in reality, the atmosphere conjured up by the novella is straight out of Brothers Grimm - magical forests, eerie apparitions and unsettling premonitions abound. Indeed this has been justly described as a "Gothic" work - it has many of the genre's tropes and is close in style to the literature of the "Uncanny" exemplified by Hoffmann and like-minded authors.

Alma Classics edition cover

English editions of this novella are rare. The Oneworld Classics edition I read (now reissued as part of the Alma Classics series) uses the 1958 translation by Doris and Lionel Thomas and includes an introduction and timeline.

It may not be "entertaining" in the usual sense of the word and is ultimately frustrating as a murder mystery, but this strange work is certainly worth reading.