(German) Jurek Becker. Bronstein's Children [Bronsteins Kinder] Tr. Leila Vennewitz. University of Chicago Press. 1999 [Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986; HBJ, 1988]. 272 pp. Paper: $15.00; ISBN 0-226-04127-1. New in paperback. "East Berlin, 1973: an 18-year-old Jew discovers that his father's friends are holding prisoner a former Nazi concentration camp guard in the family cottage. The three older men have handcuffed the ex-Nazi to the bed and are interrogating and torturing him in an attempt to get him to admit to his war crimes . . . Becker keenly shows the tension between members of the Holocaust generation and their children, who are unable to understand the complexity of that nightmarish era of human history." (quoted from Booklist). Jurek Becker (1937-1998) is also the author of Jacob the Liar, Sleepless Days, The Boxer, and Amanda Herzlos.

Bettine von Arnim and Gisela von Arnim Grimm. The Life of High Countess Gritta von Ratsinourhouse [Leben der Hochgräfin Gritta von Rattenzuhausbeiuns]. Tr. and intro. Lisa Ohm. University of Nebraska Press. 1999. 154 pp. Cloth: $35.00; ISBN 0-8032-4665-X. Paper: $15.00; ISBN 0-8032-9620-7. European Women Writers Series. Appearing here for the first time in English translation, this delightful story of the adventures of twelve young girls superimposes a fairy tale over the structure of a female Bildungsroman to demonstrate constraints on women who pursue intellectual and artistic growth. Neglected by her father, Gritta is uprooted when her new stepmother insists she enter a convent school. Strictly supervised by the nun Sequestra, Gritta slips into melancholy. A mishandled bird awakens Gritta to the realization that she and her friends must flee their walled-in lives. The runaway girls are eventually shipwrecked and establish a Robinson Crusoe-like existence, eventually founding their own cloister. Co-authored in the early 1840s by Gisela von Arnim Grimm (daughter-in-law of the legendary Wilhelm Grimm) and her mother, Bettine, this story lay undiscovered in an archive for nearly a century before the full text was retrieved from oblivion in 1986. An introductory essay by Lisa Ohm entitled, "The Fairy Tale of Women's Bildung in the Nineteenth Century" provides a wealth of historical, cultural, and biographical information helpful to understanding the work in the context of the German literary tradition.

Ingeborg Bachmann. The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldman ["Todesarten"-Projekt]. Tr. and intro. Peter Filkins. Northwestern University Press. 1999 [R. Piper GmbH & Co., Munich, 1995]. Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press. 233 pp. Cloth: $22.95; ISBN 0-8101-1705-3. These unfinished novels, Ingeborg Bachmann's only untranslated works of fiction, were intended to follow her widely acclaimed work, Malina in a cycle to be entitled Todesarten, or Ways of Dying. Although Bachmann herself died before completing them, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldman stand on their own, continuing Bachmann's tradition of using language to confront the diseases plaguing human relationships. Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, she explores the "ways of dying" inflicted upon the living from outside and from within, through history, politics, religion, family, gender relations, and the self. These works solidify Bachmann's position as the most important female German-language writer of the postwar period. Filkins is also the translator of Songs in Flight: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, for which he received the 1994 ALTA Outstanding Translation Award.

Ingeborg Bachmann. Three Radio Plays [Hörspiele]. Tr. Lilian Friedberg. Afterword Sarah J. Colvin. Ariadne Press. 1999 [Piper Verlag GmbH, München, 1976]. 222 pp. Paper: ISBN 1-57241-079-5. Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought. Three radio plays by Bachmann are included in this volume: "A Deal in Dreams (1952) examines the high price of dreams for sale in the dim light of a big city pawnshop; "The Cicadas (1955) is the tale of the "marooned," where the isolation of the island as an escape from the real world is symbolized in the cicadas' song; and "The Good God of Manhattan" (1958), which follows a man from the "Old World" and a woman "from the new world" who fall prey to the age-old perils of love in Manahttan. In her Translator's Note, Lilian Friedberg discusses the challenge of translating radio plays, a genre "solely dependent on the sound of language as a vehicle for transmission."

Johann Beer. German Winter Nights [Die teutschen Winter-Nächte]. Tr. John Russell. Intro. James Harden. Camden House. 1999 [1682]. 254 pp. Cloth: $50.00; ISBN 1-57113-195-7. One of the watermarks of German Baroque literature, German Winter Nights clearly owes much in motif and style to Grimmelshausen's picaresque novel, Simplicius Simplicis-simus, its blend of outrageous humor and unprecendented realism highly readable even today. The picaresque novel came to Germany in the early seventeenth century in the form of translations and adaptations from Romance sources, with native examples appearing only in the second half of the century. Beer's work, which was not identified until 1932, reveals the influence of Spanish and French models, but it also shows the influence of his native Austrian landscape, the German chapbook, and his wide reading both in adventure literature and books of contemporary literary theory (poetics). This novel is perhaps most important as a cultural mirror of the late 17th century, rich in folklore, humor, and details of everyday Austrian life. John Russell is currently translating its sequel, Die kurzweiligen Sommer-Tage (1682), as Summer Tales.

Milo Dor and Reinhard Federmann. International Zone [Internationale Zone]. Tr. Jerry Glenn and Jennifer Kelley-Thierman. Aridne Press [Picus Verlag, Vienna]. 1999. 212 pp. Paperback original: ISBN 1-57241-076-0. Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought. International Zone is a detective-mystery novel set in postwar Vienna and modeled on the popular American detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The plot centers around a number of characters, many of them from Eastern Europe, who are struggling to survive in difficult times. The geography of Vienna is important as the city was split between the Eastern and Western zones but an "international zone" was shared by the occupation forces. Author Milo Dor (Milutin Doroslovac) was a Serbian resistor captured by Nazis in Yugoslavia and sent to do forced labor in Vienna, where he has lived since 1945 as a member of that rare breed of creative writer who opts not to work in his native language. Other translations by Jerry Glenn include works by Celan, Fried, and Piontek. Glenn and Kelley-Thierman also collaborated on the translation of Dor's autobiography, On the Wrong Track (Ariadne, 1993).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Fairy Tales, Short Stories, and Poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Ed. and tr. J. W. Thomas. Peter Lang. 1998. 137 pp. Cloth: $33.95; ISBN 0-8204-3741-7. American University Studies I, Germanic Languages and Literatures 109. Goethe's short narratives are almost unknown outside of Germany, chiefly because, with one exception, they are buried in longer works that have been forgotten by all but Goethe scholars. The present collection introduces these pieces to an English-speaking public, together with a representative selection of Goethe's poetry. Contents include "The Fairy Tale" (from Conversation of German Refugees), "The New Paris" (from his autobiography, the first part of which was published in 1811), "The New Melusina" (from Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, 1826), "The Ghost," "The Lawyer," "The Singular Children of Neighbors" (in his novel, Elective Affinities, 1809), and "Novella" (begun 1979, published 1828). The poems are from German Verse from the 12th to the 20th Century in English Translation (1963) also translated and edited by J. W. Thomas.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Poems of the West and East: West-Eastern Divan/West-Östlicher Divan, A Bi-Lingual Edition of the Complete Poems. Tr. John Whaley. Intro. Katharina Mommsen. Peter Lang (Berne). 1998. 493 pp. Cloth: $70.95; ISBN 3-906759-62-8. Germanic Studies in America 68. Goethe's West-Eastern Divan, his greatest cycle of poems in both its volume and its quality, has been called, along with Faust, his most important and most personal work. Yet despite its masterpiece status, the work is only now becoming known outside scholarly circles in Germany as well as in the English-speaking world. The West in his title stands for the Occident, while the East comprises Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew lands. With very few exceptions, Goethe's poems are not translations of Oriental poetry, nor was he trying to imitate such poetry. According to Katharina Mommsen, "His Divan results from an assimilation which could only stem from an inward affinity, as if the alien poetry was born again in the West-Eastern Divan."

Zoë Jenny. The Pollen Room [Das Blütenstaubzimmer] . Tr. Elizabeth Gaffney. Simon & Schuster. 1999 [Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt GmbH, Frankfurt Am Main, 1997]. 144 pp. Cloth: $20.00; ISBN 0-684-85458-9. In 1997, Zoë Jenny was just twenty-three when this, her first novel, was published in Germany and caused a sensation among readers and critics alike. This potent coming-of-age story has been compared to other important literary works like Catcher in the Rye and On the Road that sum up the attitude of a generation. Because no place names or times are provided throughout the entire story, and no concrete explanations are given for the day-to-day, often monotonous, actions taken by the characters that populate the book, Jenny subtly but insistently conveys a childlike perspective. Her narrator, Jo, grows up afraid of the shadows and desperate for company and by age seventeen, has learned to build her own happiness. Ultimately, it is Jo's revelation about her mother's demons that brings a bittersweet reconciliation of childhood dreams and adult reality. The author has fended off questions about this story being her own, choosing only to reveal that she "felt a need to write this, to write about this fundamental feeling of being lost, of fear. These are feelings that I know, that I try to express through characters."

Olaf Georg Klein. Aftertime [Nachzeit] . Tr. Margot Bettauer Dembo. Northwestern University Press. 1999 [Thomas Müller, Berlin, 1990]. 116 pp. Cloth: $24.95; ISBN 0-8101-1504-2. Aftertime is the story of a young woman's struggle to come to grips with the aftermath of a devastating catastrophe. In her last year at the university in Kiev and shortly before she is to take her final examinations, the narrator is persuaded by her roommate to go for a cruise on a large lake north of the city. While her friends dance in the ballroom, the young woman stands on deck, enjoying the tranquil evening. Sixty miles away, a nuclear reactor explodes. In the days that follow, panic and rumors are met with official denial of the risks to public health. Then the young woman's symptoms begin to appear. The book follows her attempts to come to grips with her small place in history, and with that history's enormous impact on her life, creating a saga with great resonance for all people living uneasily with technology in the twentieth century. Margot Bettauer Dembo is the translator of Triumph of Hope, Europa, Europa, and Lost in a Labyrinth of Red Tape.

Herta Müller. Nadirs [Nierderungen] . Tr. Sieglinde Lug. University of Nebraska Press. 1999 [Romania, 1982; Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin, 1984]. 126 pp. Cloth: $40.00; ISBN 0-8032-3197-0. Paper: $13.00; ISBN 0-8032-8254-0. European Women Writers Series. Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, Herta Müller's first book, Nadirs, is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on her childhood. The title refers both to the geographical location of her lowland home and to its overwhelmingly oppressive atmosphere. Each tale reveals a child's often nightmarish impressions of life in her village, mixing reality with dreamlike images to convey the girl's troubled inner world and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life in Communist Romania. Originally a translator and German teacher, Herta Müller is one of the most prolific and acclaimed German-language writers of the last decade. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Kleist Prize in 1994, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her novel, The Land of the Green Plums (1998).

Rainer Maria Rilke. The Essential Rilke: Bilingual Edition. Sel. and tr. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebman. Ecco Press. 1999. 157 pp. Cloth: $22.95; ISBN 0-88001-676-0. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell and co-translator Hannah Liebmann comes The Essential Rilke, with newly translated selections of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, all of the poems in their original German on facing pages. This volume includes all the celebrated Duino Elegies as well as a number of shorter poems – the favorites and the less familiar. Contents includes selections from The Book of Images (1902, 1906), New Poems (1907, 1908), Requiem (1909), The Life of Mary (1913), and The Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), as well as four uncollected poems: "Long you must suffer" [Lange mußt du leiden], "Death" [Der Tod], "I'm not sure yet when" [Von meiner Antwort weiß ich noch nicht], and "Beside the road used to the sun" [An der sonngewohnten Straße]. In his introduction, Galway Kinnell traces the course of this project from his first encounter with Rilke's poetry while standing in the Eighth Street bookstore more than fifty years ago through the difficulties and achievements of his recent collaboration with native German speaker Hannah Liebman. Kinnell acknowledges by name many previous Rilke translators whose work he has consulted, while conferring on future translators a similar "right of pilferage" from his versions.

Arthur Schnitzler. Dream Story [Traumnovelle] . Tr. J. M. O. Davies. Warner Books. 1999 [1926]. 281 pp. Paper: $12.99; ISBN 0-446-67632-2. Austrian dramatist and novelist Arthur Schnitzler's novella, Dream Story, which is the basis for Stanley Kubrick's controversial final film, Eyes Wide Shut, appears here in a new English translation. Also included in the volume is the screenplay written by Kubrick and Frederick Raphael, and a 16-page insert of black and white stills from the movie. Dream Story is a sensual tale that explores the subconscious, forbidden desires of a husband and wife, in both their dreams and fantasies and in their increasingly daring sexual adventures. Ahead of its time and marked by the deep influence of the author's contemporary, Sigmund Freud, Schnitzler's work has become a modernist classic. The original story's themes of depravity and the elusive ambiguity of dream and reality can be compared to Kubrick's own transforming vision in the film that culminates his illustrious career.

Botho Strauss. Living Glimmering Lying [Wohnen Dämmern Lügen] . Tr. Roslyn Theobald. Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press. 1999. 171 pp. Cloth: $26.95; ISBN 0-8101-1283-3. Populated by characters who are seaching for meaning in life and in one another—a hiker waiting for a train in a deserted station, a television journalist who meets an old lover he doesn't really recognize, mismatched lovers, couples married and casual, lost and lonely people—Botho Strauss's Living Glimmering Lying is a melancholy collection of sketches and vignettes, a series of tableaux of post-reunification Berlin. Strauss is known for his powers of observation and his ability to filter the particulars of everyday existence through his singular sensibility. His works include The Young Man and Couples, Passersby, translated by Rosyln Theobald, who also translated Our House by Barbara König (Northwestern, 1998).

Hans-Ulrich Treichel. Lost [Verlorene] . Tr. Carol Brown Janeway. Pantheon. 1999 [Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1998]. 144 pp. Paper: $19.00; ISBN 0-375-40627-1. A first novel hailed as Germany's most exciting fiction debut of last year, Lost walks us into what we think is familiar territory, and then turns all our expectations upside down. An ordinary German family flees from the advancing Russian army in 1945, makes it to safety, and starts over. But in the refugee trek west there was a victim – their firstborn son, Arnold. Yet when his little brother (the story's narrator) is told that Arnold isn't dead, the search is on. Finding lost Arnold is his parents' dream, but it becomes his brother's nightmare. Often wickedly funny, Lost is a psychological and emotional roller coaster seen through the eyes of the youngest and "most subversive" person in the novel. Carol Brown Janeway's translations include Benjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments, Marie de Hennezel's Intimate Death, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, and Jan Philipp Reemtsma's In the Cellar.

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