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Franz Kafka in a New Biography By Reiner Stach -- Translated by Shelley Frisch

Reiner Stach, who has worked extensively on the definitive edition of Kafka.s collected works, has devoted more than a decade to researching and writing Kafka: The Decisive Years, translated by Shelley Frisch. Stach has worked with four thousand pages of journal entries, letters, and literary fragments, many of which have never before been available. In this volume, the first of three now available in English, Stach portrays the years 1910 to 1915. In 1912, Kafka began to work on .The Judgment. and .The Metamorphosis,. Amerika, and The Trial. In his biography, Stach takes the reader through the composition of these major pieces day by day and, in some cases, even hour by hour. These years also cover Kafka.s close friendship with Max Brod and the outbreak of World War I.

Hans-Ulrich Treichel. Lost. (Der Verlorene) Translated by Carol Brown Janeway.

The novel portrays an ordinary German family that flees from the advancing Russian army in 1945, yet makes it to safety and starts a new life in the postwar economic miracle. The development of the events is seen through the eyes of the nameless narrator, who reveals early on that in the general confusion of fleeing from the Russians, his brother, Arnold, was lost. Thus, the entire novel deals with the guilt of the parents, who feel responsible for the loss of Arnold, and therefore set a whole sequence of desperate searches in motion to find their lost son. Threaded into the basic plot are elaborate descriptions of the family’s everyday life: a typically derailed middle-class German family. There are no memorable moments in their lives. The mother spends many hours weeping, the father shows no emotional reactions, and the narrator is unable to do anything about this dreary family life. No solutions are reached throughout the novel. Treichel paints human beings who ultimately become the victims of their own inertia and total emotional emptiness. Lost is a short novel of 130 pages that intrigues the reader by its refreshing linguistic energy and its accurate portrayal of the absence of genuine human relationships.

Uwe Timm

The recently published novel Morenga, by Uwe Timm, translated by Breon Mitchell, has been well received in the United States. The novel recounts the conflict between the colonial German empire and the rebellious Africans of the Hottentot and Herero tribes led by the legendary Morenga in the former German colony of South West Africa between 1904 and 1907. Timm spent several years researching the historical background of this uprising, and consequently, the novel is an intriguing mix of fact and fiction. Here is what Timm had to say about this aspect of his novel: "There are situations in the novel that a writer could not have made up. If they had been invented, one would think the author had gone too far. For example, the vocabulary of punishment, when the Germans discuss techniques for flogging the African natives. Those are things that are taken directly from historical documents. There were other matters, however, that seemed to me to demand fictional treatment. For example, the figure of Gottschalk, a veterinarian, who arrives in Africa and is changed by it; how he first experiences it, how it alters him, and how those alterations are revealed in his character. That is all fictional, the protagonist of the novel, Gottschalk, is a fictional character."

The novel drew particular attention in this country because it could be considered a precursor of the undertakings of the soon to arrive Third Reich, with its focus on racial inferiority and the Untermensch. Timm was interested in projecting the mentality of people who desire to come to a foreign country, to oppress other human beings, and to torture or kill them. These are all themes that have plagued the history of the 20th century. When the translation of Morenga was reviewed in The New York Times, the reviewer thought it appropriate to draw a parallel between the content of the novel and the war in Iraq. Other works by Uwe Timm in English: Headhunter. Translated by Peter Tegel. The Invention of Curried Sausage. Translated by Leila Vennewitz. Midsummmer Night. Translated by Peter Tegel.

All of Timm's novels, including Morenga, have been published by New Directions.

The Germans Are Breaking an Old Taboo

The new novel by Günter Grass titled Crabwalk ("Im Krebsgang"), translated by Krishna Winston, revives the trauma of carpet-bombing and the devastating destruction of many German cities. This time, however, history is being reversed, and the Germans focus on the atrocities that the British, the Russians, and the Americans inflicted on Germany during World War II. Crabwalk recalls a historical tragedy: the sinking of the refugee ship Gustloff by a Soviet submarine in the spring of 1945 with 9000 women and children. In the past three years that German writers and historians have begun to address a topic previously considered taboo: the sufferings of the German people in the last years of World War II. W. G. Sebald wrote the essay "Air War and Literature" (Luftkrieg und Literatur"), which was published by Random House under the title of "On the Natural History of Destruction." An excerpt of that essay had been published in The New Yorker (November 2002). In addition, the historian Jörg Friedrich published an elaborate study titled "Der Brand" (The Fire), which, however, has not yet been translated into English. In this study, which immediately became a best-seller in Germany, Friedrich elaborately chronicles the effects of the carpet-bombing of German cities. Grass and Sebald have taken the audacious step to change an established way of looking at World War II. Fifty years after the war, the Germans, who inflicted so many atrocities on other nations, are now inclined to see themselves as the victims of a war they originally had unleashed on the world.

A review, German literature that appeared in English translation since 1998 , has been added to the existing information on German books which have been translated into English.

German literature that appeared in English translation in 1998 ,

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Updated 20NOV11 0852 CST