Category Archives: Literature

Allegedly Because of Snow – Angeblich wegen Schnee (2013) A Winter Book edited by Babette Schaefer

Posted in Books, Literature by

Angeblich wegen Schnee

Consider this as a hybrid post for German Literature Month as two-thirds of the book include texts from other countries but it’s such an excellent book that I had to write about it now.

I found this snowy anthology in the bookshop recently and don’t think I’ve ever finished a collection of short stories this quickly. Anthologies are always a gamble and often at least half of the texts included don’t work for me. I think in this case there was maybe one story I didn’t like, everything else was either good or excellent.

If you are familiar with German anthologies you might now that they will consist of more than just German authors. This one is no exception. Of the 18 texts, stories and poems included, 11 are written by German writing authors, the others are from different other countries.

I’ll start with the German writing authors first.

Judith Zander – Germany. Zander is a poet. Her poem isn’t easily accessible but interesting. She has a way with words, combines metaphor and creates new words. She has not been translated so far.

Christopher Kloeble – Germany. Very interesting story of someone who takes revenge on a rapist. He hasn’t been translated yet.

Alex Capus – Switzerland. Several of Capus’ novels have been translated. Léon and Louise – A Matter of Time – Almost Like Spring. He is not an author who has tempted me so far. This story is rooted in the 60s. The narrator looks back on his childhood. An older self speaks to the younger person who goes through feelings of shame and inadequacy. The style was too unadorned for me, but I could imagine that would work well for others.

Arno Geiger – Austria. Geiger always receives a lot of positive feedback and prizes for his novels. One of which We Are Doing Fine has been translated. This anthology contains a chapter taken from the novel Anna nicht vergessen – Don’t forget Anna) and it’s told from the point of view of an obsessive compulsive stalker. Chilling.

Antje Rávic Strubel – Germany. Rávic Strubel is one of the younger authors of the anthology. She was born in the former GDR. The story in this anthology shows a writer with a powerful voice and a knack for quirky stories rooted in the hip culture of modern-day Germany.

Mascha Kaléko – Germany. Kaléko was a very famous Jewish-German poet, one whose trademark it was to write about the working life of typists, life in a big city, and small, mundane things. She was one of those who left Germany early. She emigrated to the US in 1938. It seems her work hasn’t been translated, which is a shame as the poems are like very short stories, evocative and beautiful.

Peter Schwiefert – Germany. I hadn’t heard of Peter Schwiefert before but the letter included in this anthology, which has been taken from the collection edited by his sister Angelika Schrobsdorff was quite a discovery. It’s a letter to his mother Elke who has been portrayed by Angelika in the book You Are Not Like Other Mothers. Peter Schwiefert died fighting for the Allies in France, in 1940. From Angelikas’ biography of her mother it is known that she was an amazing woman. Very free for her time. The tone of the letter of her son shows an intimate and very loving relationship. I’ll certainly read Angelika’s book and the collection of Peter’s letters to his mother.

Ingo Schulze – Germany. Schulze was born in the former GDR. Since his first publications Simple Stories and 33 Moments of Happiness (both available in English) he is one of the most important German authors. The text included here is taken from Orangen und Engle (Oranges and Angels) – sketches from Italy. I loved this so much, it put me in the mood to read everything he’s written. It’s an autobiographical story, set in Italy where Schulze spent some time. His most striking talent is to paint with words and to capture another culture, other cities with a few words but at the same time, he gives us an intimate view of a writer’s life.

Siegfried Lenz – Germany. Lenz is one of the German classics. Many of his books like The German Lesson – A Minute of Silence – Stella and many more have been translated. The story in the anthology is taken from a collection of short stories. It’s about ice fishing. Not much of a story but written in masterful style.

Peter Handke – Austria. Handke is a modern classic of Austrian literature and widely translated (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Short Letter, Long Farewell – Slow Homecoming). I reviewed his A Sorrow Beyond Dreams here Like Grass he’s not as much liked in Germany or Austria anymore due to problematic political statements. As a writer he’s highly acclaimed. He’s not one of the most accessible but praised for his unique style. The text here is a short part taken from a novel. It’s the only contribution in the book that didn’t do much for me. It was well written but taken out of context it felt odd.

Thomas Glavinic – Austria. Glavinic is an interesting author and I’ve been meaning to read him for a while. The piece in this book was taken from a novel and while I didn’t really see where the novel as a whole would go, it made me curious to read more of him and I could see why critics and readers alike are drawn to his writing. These are some of the titles available in English The Camera Killer – Night Work – Pull Yourself Together. I’d like to read The Camera Killer, story of a double murder of which is said “ it is a disturbing game planned and executed with disturbing perfection.”

The other authors

Graham Swift -UK. I don’t think I need to introduce Graham Swift. The excerpt was taken from the novel Wish You Were Here. It didn’t really work as a standalone, but made me curious to read the book. I’ve read Swift before and liked him quite a bit.

Muriel Barbery – France. The anthology includes a chapter from her novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I’ve got it here and am pretty sure I’ll read it soon. It was one of the best contributions in this book. Dense, multilayered, original.

Mikko Rimminen – Finland. Rimminen was another new to me author. The text included was fast-paced and action-driven. It’s been taken from one of his novels. He’s been translated into Italian, French, German but not English so far.

David Guterson – US. I never felt like reading Snow Falling on Cedars but the excerpt in this anthology put me in the mood. I can see why some people may think he overdid it with the descriptions but I loved it.

Gyula Krúdy – Hungary. I’ve been meaning to read Hungarian author Krúdy for years now and keep on collecting his books. The short story here is a wonderful end-of the-year story full of melancholia and nostalgia. Of all the stories in the book I’d say this and the piece by Polish writer Wlodzimierz Odojewski were the most emotional and amazing regarding style. Krúdy’s work has been translated. Life is a Dream – Sunflower

Fan Wu – China/US.  Fan Wu is the author of February Flowers a novel I’d love to read since the story included in the anthology was one of the best. She was born in China and writes in English and Chinese. The story included here is a psychological portrait, rooted in a Chinese setting. Really appealing. Most of her stories are available in English in magazines like Granta, The Missouri Review  . . .

Wlodzimierz Odojewski -Poland. The biggest discovery was this new to me Polish author. His story takes place in an apartment at night, in winter. Young Marek and his older cousin Karola stay behind when thier parents go to church. The darkness invades the place and Marek feels a happiness like never before. The story is rich in atmosphere and relates memories of a childhood during war. The war is not very present, there are just hints here and there. Odojewski has been translated into several languages but not English. I’ve ordered one of his novellas and am really looking forward to start it.

Do you know any of these authors?

On Eduard von Keyserling’s – Schwüle Tage (Sultry Days) – (1916)

Posted in Books, German Literature, Literature, Novel by

Schwüle Tage

Today we had the first snow. I woke to a fine layer of white in the morning. I don’t think it will stay, it’s already raining. Nonetheless it is strange to write about a book set during a sultry, sweltering summer.

Occasionally critics wonder why Eduard von Keyserling is not as widely read in Germany as Theodor Fontane. I often wonder why he isn’t translated into English. After having read the novella Schwüle Tage (Sultry Days) I think I can say with great certainty that being compared to Fontane may be the reason for both. Not because he isn’t as good and the comparison would be unfavorable, no, just because it’s wrong or, at least, not entirely correct. There is another important author whose work is far closer to Keyserling and that is Arthur Schnitzler. The subconscious plays a far greater role in Keyserling than in Fontane. Suppressed emotions and sensuality are more important than class and the rules of society. This particluar novella put me also in mind of an author I have discovered earlier this year: Hjalmar Söderberg.

None of his works illustrates this better than Schwüle Tage a short novella set during one hot summer. It is told from the point of view of an 18 year-old student who, failing his exams, can’t join his mother and siblings and spend his summer holiday  on the sea-side but has to stay with his patriarchical and domineering father on his estate. The young man is bored to death and quite afraid of his stern and pedantic father. Battling boredom and budding sexuality, he spends his days studying or yearning for fulfilment.

While the estate is busy during the day and servants and maids go about their tasks, mysterious things happen at night. Everyone seessm to lead a secret life during the night. One of the maids sings languorous songs in the park, his father goes for long walks, servants sneak around. Some of the servants tell the young man, that the night is the time during which everyone tries to satisfy their needs. The boy wants to participate and manages to seduce one of the maids.

Secretly the young man is in love with one of his cousins. The two girls are the only young people from the same social background he will see during this summer. He’s sad to know that the older and more seductive will get married and appalled when he finds out that she has a lover. Not only is he disappointed that she belongs to someone else but horrified to find out it is his father.

The end of the novella is unexpectedly tragic and will stay in my mind for a long time.

I loved how this tragic story was rendered, in impressionistic touches, and focussing on the hidden desires and yearnings of these people. They were all trapped in this rigid society and many a stern face was hiding great pain.

When I read this story I was reminded of many of Schnitzler’s tales and found it odd that a German writer, notably one from the Baltic sea, wrote like an Austrian. Only after finishing Schwüle Tage did I discover that von Keyserling studied and lived in Vienna for a long time and later moved to Münich where he stayed until his death. I felt that the influence was palpable. As much as I like Fontane, I love von Keyserling more because he adds a more interior, intimate layer to his writing.

I really hope that editors discover this amazing author and start to translate his work.

Barbara Honigmann: A Love Made Out of Nothing – Eine Liebe aus nichts (1991)

Posted in Books, German Literature, Literature, Readalong by

A Love Made Out of Nothing

Barbara Honigmann’s A Love Made Out of Nothing tells the story of a young expatriate’s journey back to Weimar to attend her father’s funeral. As the narrator remembers her father’s life, she explores her own past and relates her struggle to establish new roots following her emigration from Berlin to Paris. In its portrayal of a young woman’s complex relationship with her father, the novella offers a rich account of German-Jewish history and of the search for identity in the shadow of World War II.

This is my first book by German author Barbara Honigmann but it’s not going to be my last. I loved this novella. A Love Made Out of Nothing  – Eine Liebe aus nichts is written in a very intimate style, almost like a memoir. Honigmann usually weaves her own life into the narrative, blending fact and fiction.

The narrator, who lives in Paris, starts her story with the funeral of her father. He has died in Weimar and she wanted to attend. It’s the first time in years that she goes back to Germany. She’s born in East-Berlin after the war to Jewish parents who had spent WWII in England. After the war the father decides to live in the Russian sector.

Her father has been married four times, her mother was wife number two. She’s returned to her home country Bulgaria years ago and even lost the German language. There is no possibility for the narrator to communicate with her as she doesn’t speak Bulgarian.

During her childhood she spent all of her weekends with her father and stayed in contact with him ever since. A couple of years before his death, she leaves the DDR and moves to Paris, hoping that a new city, a new language would not only bring a new life but her own transformation.

Much of her emotional life is full of shadows and muted grief over the impossibility to live with the man she loves. All they have is a “Love Made Out of Nothing” as it proves to be impossible for them to live together. When she meets someone else that love can’t be lived either because the man returns to the US.

Memory, identity, languages, exile and emigration are the themes this small poetic book explores. The reasons why someone leaves his or her home country are complex. Political reasons, danger, a lack of freedom are triggers, but they are not the only motive. There is always also the wish to become another person and when that isn’t possible what remains is a feeling of loss and unfulfilled yearning. The narrator wishes to be rootless, but, paradoxically, in trying to run away from her home and her parents she imitates their life.

Barbara Honigmann is a Jewish author but she transcends the Jewish experience and captures the universality of her themes, making it easy for non-Jewish readers to identify. I have read the German edition of this book that’s why I can’t tell you anything about the second novella, which is contained in the English edition.

Helmut Krausser: The Great Bagarozy – Der grosse Bagarozy (1997)

Posted in Books, German Literature, Literature, Novel by

the-great-bagarozy

To enjoy this novel you don’t need to be a fan of Maria Callas but you should at least be interested in her life, as The Great Bagarozy – Der grosse Bagarozy is to a large extent an homage to the late Diva. (When you look at the German cover you’ll notice that they chose to make that fact obvious. Not so for the English cover.)

Cora Dulz is a psychiatrist. A very bored one and not exactly someone you’d call compassionate. She’s bored with her marriage to a cardiac tax consultant whose greatest interest is to collect morbid obituaries. There is nothing else in his life he’s this passionate about. Although some hints tell us that he likes to hire cleaning women who perform their tasks naked.

Cora is equally bored by her patients whose ailments make her either yawn or laugh. When two of them commit suicide, she fears for her practice. During this troubled time a new patient appears. Stanislaus Nagy, a man who is obsessed with Maria Callas and states to have known her very well. He pretends to be the devil himself and maintains that he has accompanied Maria during most of her life in the form of a black poodle.

Now this is a story that wakes up Cora. Not only is she interested in this new patient’s story, no, she also falls in love with him and fantasizes constantly about having sex with him. When he doesn’t turn up anymore she looks for him and ends up chasing him until she finds him on the stage of a music hall performing as The Great Bagarozy.

Kraussers novel deliberately blurs every line and confuses assumptions. Is Nagy ill? Or maybe Cora is far more obsessed than he is? Is he really the devil? Could that be?

Whether Nagy is just a devilish man playing tricks on a bored psychiatrist or whether he really is the devil is for you to find out. In any case, he pushes Cora to commit something quite horrible in the end.

I found this novel to be interesting, witty, funny, full of symbolism and extremely well-written. Krausser has a way with words, many of his sentences are worth quoting, and his descriptions are unusual like when he says the sky was the grey of poisoned doves. I’ve always been fascinated by Maria Callas. The woman and the legend and the fact that she’s actually not that good a singer but was considered, and still is considered, one of the greatest. Her life was tragic until the end. If you’re interested in her you’ll learn quite a lot about her life. I loved that Krausser chose to add the macabre obituaries Cora’s husband collects. It added a Six Feet Under feel to the story. He also chose to add many photos of Maria Callas, which add another layer. It’s interesting how her pictures seem to mirror her voice. She could be so beautiful on one photo, and look really rough on the next. When she was younger she managed to sing quite a pure soprano (especially in Tosca) but later on she was much more of a mezzo-soprano (as in Carmen), which, as far as I know, was her true voice type.

The Great Bagarozy is a funny, wicked, entertaining book and a great homage to Maria Callas.

The book has been made into a movie directed by Bernd Eichinger.

der-grosse-bagarozy-072101614

Welcome to German Literature Month

Posted in Books, German Literature, Literature, Readalong by

image

Lizzy and I are happy to announce the official beginning of German Literature Month. A few introduction posts and lists have cropped up here and there already, which tells us, the event will be running strong once more.

Since google reader doesn’t exist anymore and a really great alternative hasn’t been found, we’ve decided to set up a German Literature Month site on Blogger which allows you to use Mr. Linky.

Please sign up and leave your links here: German Literature Month Blog

You can find the link to the review site on my sidebar.

I’ve already started a couple of books and hope to be able to post the first reviews soon.

My plans are, as usual. over-enthusiastic.

I’m currently reading or planning on reading the following books

Allissa Walser Mesmerized – Am Anfang war die Nacht Musik

W.G Sebald The Emigrants – Die Ausgewanderten

Ferdinand von Schirach – Tabu (not translated yet)

Eduard von Keyserling – Schwüle Tage (not translated)

Elke Schwitters Mrs Sartoris – Frau Sartoris

Stefan Zweig – Beware of Pity – Ungeduld des Herzens

Please sign up and leave your links here: German Literature Month Blog

Vasily Grossman: Everything Flows (1961) Literature and War Readalong October 2013

Posted in Books, Literature, Novel, Readalong by

Everything Flows

Would you inform on people to save your own life? Sign papers knowing very well it will send people to the Gulag? Would you? If you are like me, you are unable to answer this question. You will hope that you wouldn’t but how can you be sure. It didn’t take a lot for people to be sent to the camps. Anything would make the state suspect subversiveness.Some were sent because others signed a paper, some were sent because they didn’t sign papers. According to the afterword Grossman did precisely that, he signed a paper which served to arrest a group of doctors. He must have felt guilty all of his life, resented his own weakness. Exploring why people would do such a thing, is one of the themes in Everything Flows. It’s not always out of fear or cowardice.

A friend of Ivan Grigoryevich is responsible that he is sent to the Gulag for thirty years. He is released after Stalin’s death in 1953. At first he visits his cousin Nikolay, in Moscow. Nikolay is a scientist who has made a remarkable career, due to some extent to his betrayal of others. When he sees Ivan again, he’s incapable of showing compassion of listening to Ivan’s story. All he does is talk about his own hardships. How very cynical. No deprivations endured outside can be compared with what those in the camps had to go through. These are poignant scenes, which show the selfishness and faulty thinking of so many, the struggle between a bad conscience and the aim to refuse any responsibility. Ivan then moves on to Leningrad where he hopes to meet a former lover. He meets Anna Sergeyevna instead and shares a room with her and her little son. Her husband has been sent to a camp. She blames herself for having taken part in the Terror famine of 1932-3.

The story of Ivan is the only coherent storyline. It is interrupted by stories of other people and many non-fiction parts – on the terror against the Ukrainians, on Lenin and Stalin, on their terror regimes, on the way the Soviet Union worked. This made me wonder often whether Everything Flows can really be called a novel. Where is the borderline? How much non-fiction elements can a book contain and still be called fiction? Grossman didn’t see the publication of Everything Flows and it is possible he would have altered it, still, according to the afterword, it’s finished the way it is. He would not have removed the nonfiction parts, although it seems obvious that they were added to the manuscript later.

Until WWII Grossman was loyal to the Soviet state but after having witnessed the war, having been in Stalingrad, that changed completely. From then on he was focussing in his work on writing about everything as truthfully as possible, on not embellishing and buying into the state’s way of distorting the truth. This cost him almost everything and I’m surprised he was never sent to the Gulag himself. One of his most traumatic experiences was when his novel Life and Fate was confiscated. What further contributed to his critical view of the Soviet state was Stalin’s antisemitism.

In his best parts Everything Flows is an amazing testimony of compassion and humanity. In other parts it is a masterful depiction of the human condition and an open criticism of totalitarianism. Some of the non-fiction parts were a bit heavy going, as I was not familiar with many of the names and with Soviet history in general. I think he rendered the atmosphere of being unfree and the paranoia very well.

I’d like to read a biography of Grossman. He served 1000 days during WWII, was present in Stalingrad and his The Hell of Treblinka was the first eyewitness account and was used during the Nuremberg trials. Has anyone read the Gerrard’s biography The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman or Grossman’s The Writer at War?

Other reviews

Andrew Blackman

Danielle (A Work in Progress)

Silver Seasons (Silver Threads)

*******

Everything Flows was the tenth book in the Literature and War Readalong 2013. The next is the WWII novel Death of the Adversary aka Der Tod des Widersachers by German writer Hans Keilson. Discussion starts on Friday 29 November, 2013. Further information on the Literature and War Readalong, including the book blurbs can be found here.

German Women Writers – A Few More Suggestions

Posted in Books, German Literature, Literature by

image

German Literature Month is upcoming and since we’d like to promote women writers I thought, I give you some more suggestions. Two years ago I wrote this post containing mostly classics. Below you find a list with newer or lesser-known authors and books who are all interesting. None of these have been reviewed in one of the past GLM. There would be so many more if only they were translated.

Mrs Sartoris

Elke Schmitter – Germany

Mrs Sartoris

An explosive first novel – Madame Bovary in modern Germany – about a wife and mother whose failed love affairs have driven her to the edge of sanity and to a startling attempt at vindication. After being jilted by a rich boyfriend, Margaret, eighteen and heartbroken, throws herself into a comfortable but stifling marriage to Ernst, a war veteran with a penchant for routine and order, who still lives with his mother in a small German village.

It’s not a bad life, considering Margaret’s psychological scars, but neither Ernst’s adoration nor the birth of a daughter can reawaken her frozen emotions. Until she slides into an affair with a married man with whom she plans to run away. Her plan is a fantasy that cannot possibly come true. Its repercussions nevertheless will explode with unimaginable force in these astonished lives.

Rain

Karen Duve – Germany

Rain

“It will get better when it stops raining,” said Leon. When Leon Ulbricht lands a contract to write a gangster’s memoirs and moves into his dream home in an East German village with his beautiful wife Martina, everything seems set for an idyllic existence. But the dream home turns out to be in the middle of a fetid swamp; his house and marriage are falling apart; he can’t write the book and has spent all of his advance. It rains without end and their attempts to repair the house, or at least dry it out, are hampered by the plague of slugs eating away at the foundations. And then the gangster, wondering why his memoirs are not yet completed, decides to get nasty.

The Pollen Room

Zoe Jenny – Switzerland

The Pollen Room

Carlin Romano “The Philadelphia Inquirer”A European “Catcher in the Rye” or “Less than Zero” — a “spokenovel” for its generation….Abounds in gleaming sentences, in burnished image after image…[Jenny] is a beautifully disciplined writer.

House of Childhood

Anna Mitgutsch – Austria

House of Childhood

Max Berman, a successful but rootless New York restoration architect, socialite, and ladies’ man, remembers his childhood home in the small Austrian town of “H,” mostly through his mother‚’s cherished photographs and vivid stories. When she dies, still longing for the house she fled with her husband and young children in 1928, Max temporarily abandons his playboy lifestyle and travels to H, determined to reclaim the confiscated house.

In H, Max encounters Nadja, a young woman convinced that her late mother was Jewish and that the local synagogue will provide the sense of community she lacks. Recognizing that she is too talented for her provincial neighbors, he arranges for her to attend college in the U.S., where she becomes the most significant of his many lovers. He also befriends Arthur Spitzer, a Holocaust survivor and the leader of H’s dwindling Jewish community, who helps him regain legal control of his mother’s house. When, years later, the last of his tenants finally moves out, Max returns to investigate his family’s ties in H for a fateful year that challenges his restlessness and seems to offer the chance for real belonging.

Acclaimed Austrian writer Anna Mitgutsch’s novel is a powerful examination of the meaning of home—in a place, a community, a relationship—and the difficulty of finding one in our tumultuous world.

Roggenkamp

Viola Roggenkamp – Germany

The Spectale Salesman’s Family

Paul Schiefer is a travelling spectacles salesman. Every Monday morning he leaves Hamburg on a week-long sales trip. His wife, his mother-in-law and his two teenage daughters Fania and Vera see him off with abundant hugs and kisses, and they welcome him back with equal exuberance on Friday evening – just in time for Sabbath eve. While her husband is away, Alma Schiefer defends the wellbeing of her family with an explosive mixture of ferocious love and extreme determination. Thirteen-year-old Fania is torn between the comfort of home and the fearful thrills of the unknown outside world, a sixties world that contains student protest, beehive hairdos, Israel and the Six Day War, politics, religion, revolution and . . . the promise of love. Sensual, funny and acerbic, The Spectacle Salesman’s Family is a brilliant, vivid portrait of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany that continues the Jewish tradition of memorialising, recounting the details in order to hold onto the past and its lessons.

 

Trobadora Beatrice

Irmtraud Morgner – Germany

The Lives and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura

Set in the German Democratic Republic of the early 1970s, The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice-a landmark novel now translated into English for the first time-is a highly entertaining adventure story as well as a feminist critique of GDR socialism, science, history, and aesthetic theory. In May 1968, after an eight-hundred-year sleep, Beatrice awakens in her Provence château. Looking for work, she makes her way to Paris in the aftermath of the student uprisings, then to the GDR (recommended to her as the “promised land for women”), where she meets Laura Salman, socialist trolley driver, writer, and single mother, who becomes her minstrel and alter ego. Their exploits-Beatrice on a quest to find the unicorn, Laura on maternity leave in Berlin-often require black-magic interventions by the Beautiful Melusine, who is half dragon and half woman. Creating a montage of genres and text types, including documentary material, poems, fairy tales, interviews, letters, newspaper reports, theoretical texts, excerpts from earlier books of her own, pieces by other writers, and parodies of typical GDR genres, Irmtraud Morgner attempts to write women into history and retell our great myths from a feminist perspective. Irmtraud Morgner (1933-90) was one of the most innovative and witty feminist writers to emerge from the GDR. Jeanette Clausen is an associate professor of German at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. She is a coeditor of German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature and is a past editor of Women in German Yearbook.

Pavel's Letters

Monika Maron – Germany

Pavel’s Letters

Teasing her family’s past out of the fog of oblivion and lies, one of Germany’s greatest writers asks about the secrets families keep, about the fortitude of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and about what becomes of the individual mind when the powers that be turn against it.

Born in a working-class suburb of wartime Berlin, Monika Maron grew up a daughter of the East German nomenklatura, despairing of the system her mother, Hella, helped create. Haunted by the ghosts of her Baptist grandparents, she questions her mother, whose selective memory throws up obstacles to Maron’s understanding of her grandparents’ horrifying denouement in Polish exile.

Maron reconstructs their lives from fragments of memory and a forgotten box of letters. In telling her family’s powerful and heroic story, she has written a memoir that has the force of a great novel and also stands both as an elaborate metaphor for the shame of the twentieth century and a life-affirming monument to her ancestors.

Do you have a favourite author writing in German?