by Unknown
The adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ says it all. Notwithstanding his relatively small body of published work, comprising three novels, one of which was left unfinished, stories and short prose fragments, Franz Kafka (1883–1924) entered the collective unconscious as few other writers have. Born in Prague into an assimilated Jewish family, he was a lawyer by trade, engaged in investigating the personal injury claims of industrial workers for the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia, who carved out precious time at night to write. Ironically, a diagnosis of tuberculosis proved both a ticket to freedom, permitting him to quit his job and devote himself entirely to writing, and a death sentence. Posterity must be eternally grateful to his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who ignored his request to burn everything.
‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (‘Die Insel der Tausendjährigen Menschen’), by Georg Kaiser, was written in 1943.
Friedrich Carl Georg Kaiser, aka Georg Kaiser (1878–1945), was born in Magdeburg and made his name in Berlin as one of the most performed playwrights of the Weimar Republic. Best known for the Expressionist style of his early plays, his style influenced Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Toller. In later plays, Kaiser shifted to a more naturalist manner characterized as Neue Sachlichkeit (new sobriety). He also collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill on several one-act operas. Following Hitler’s rise to power, Kaiser fled to Switzerland, where he continued to write until his death in 1945.
‘The Tattooed Portrait’ (‘Das Tätowierte Porträt’), by Egon Erwin Kisch, was originally part of a memoir written in German, but contracted for publication in 1936 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in New York, under the English title Crawling in an Inky River. Knopf subsequently reneged on the contract when the changing political climate in the US made the publication of a book by an exiled German writer of leftist leanings inadvisable. Redubbed Sensation Fair, the book was brought out by Modern Age Books in New York in 1941. The original German version subsequently appeared in 1942 under the title Marktplatz der Sensationen, published by the German exile press El Libro Libre, in Mexico City, and was reissued in 1967 by the Aufbau Verlag in Berlin. The German story ran again in the anthology Café Klöβchen, 38 Grotesken, edited by Joachim Schreck, published by the Eulenspiegel Verlag in Berlin in 1980.
Known as ‘Der Rasende Reporter’ (the reporter on the run), Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948) was a prolific journalist of decidedly literary inclinations. Born in Prague, of Jewish parentage, he lived through the First World War, in which he was wounded, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the proclamation of the Austrian Republic and the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Third Reich, the Second World War, exile and extensive travel, all of which he documented in countless accounts written for newspapers and thereafter compiled in some thirty-five books. ‘There is nothing more sensational in this world,’ wrote Kisch, summing up his credo, ‘than the time in which we live.’
‘A Raw Recruit’ (‘Gestellung’), by Klabund, was written in 1915, and published in Der Kunterbuntergang des Abendlandes (The Higgledy-Piggledy Path of Western Civilization), 1922.
Poet, songwriter, satirist, novelist and playwright, Klabund, aka Alfred Henschke (1890–1928), was born in Krossen, and grew up in Frankfurt (Oder), the hometown of Heinrich von Kleist. A student of philosophy, philology and drama, he derived his pen-name from a combination of Klabautermann (a mischievous imp in North German folklore) and Vagabund (vagabond). Weakened lungs from tuberculosis made him unfit for military service. Though, like many of his young patriotic contemporaries, he initially welcomed the First World War, he soon changed his tune, and was charged with treason following his publication of a letter calling for the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The irreverence of his cabaret ditties made him a counter-cultural favourite of the Weimar Republic and a bête noire of the Nazis.
‘St Cecilia or the Power of Music’ (‘Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik’), by Heinrich von Kleist, first ran in several consecutive issues of Kleist’s own newspaper the Berliner Abendblätter (Berlin Evening News) before it folded.
Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), born in Frankfurt (Oder), in Prussia, was an aristocrat by birth, a rebel by inclination, a Romantic by temperament and one of German literature’s greatest stylists. His plays are now considered classics, and his chiselled prose was a model for the likes of Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. A reluctant soldier turned reticent bureaucrat, he tried and failed, first as a magazine editor, then as a newspaper publisher. ‘I do not wish to be happy,’ Kleist wrote in a letter to his half-sister Ulrike, ‘I want to plummet the lowest level of hell.’ He succeeded in his dubious wish. His writing brought him meagre renown. First hailed, then scorned by his contemporaries, Kleist put the final period on the sentence of his short life with a bullet through the head.
‘Conversation’, by Jürg Laederach, was originally published in the author’s collection Laederachs 69 Arten den Blues zu spielen (Laederach’s 69 Ways to Play the Blues), 1984.
Jürg Laederach (1945– ) was born in Basel, Switzerland. His numerous publications include novels, short story collections, plays and translations.
‘A Conversation Concerning Legs’ (‘Gespräch über Beine’), by Alfred Lichtenstein, originally appeared in the journal Aktion in 1915 and was posthumously published in the author’s book Geschichten (1919).
The life of Alfred Lichtenstein (1889–1914) lasted all of twenty-five years, cut short by a hostile bullet in the trenches of Vermandovillers on the Somme in the early days of the First World War. Born in Berlin, he studied law, later switching to theatre, before being drafted. One of the lightning rods of the German avant-garde, he published dark poems and eccentric stories in the leading Expressionist journals, Der Sturm, Simplicissimus and Die Aktion. His alter ego, Kuno Kohn, summed up the author’s credo in the story ‘Café Klößchen’: ‘The only solace is to be sad. If sadness slips into despair, better to be grotesque. Live on for a laugh. And try to find a modicum of relief in the fact that existence is little more than a string of brutal, shabby pranks.’
‘The Blackbird’ (‘Die Amsel’), by Robert Musil, originally appeared in the volume Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (Nachlaß zu Lebzeiten), published in 1935 in Zurich, where the author and his wife lived in exile from their native Austria, soon to be annexed by the Third Reich. A compilation of reflections and tales he disparagingly referred to as his ‘little stop-gap book’, it was issued to help keep his head above water while he laboured on his never-to-be-completed magnum opus, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities).
The son of an academic engineer, Robert Musil (1880–1942) was born in the Austrian provincial capital of Klagenfurt, schooled at a military academy, and trained as a mathematician, behavioural psychologist, engineer and philosopher. He digested and channelled these diverse disciplines into his incomparably well-crafted fiction, essays and plays. While his first book, Die Verwirrungen des Zögling Törless (Young Törless), was a critical and commercial success, subsequent work, fiction and plays earned him respectable reviews, and the prestigious Kleist Prize, but hardly enough money to scrape by. He wrote occasional theatre criticism to try to make ends meet, though the ends never met.
‘The Magic Egg’ (‘Das Wunder-Ei’), by Mynona, was written in 1916 and first collected in Schwarz-Weiss-Rot. Grotesken (1919). ‘A New Kind of Plaything’ (‘Neues Kinderspielzeug’) was first collected in Rosa die Schöne Schutzmannsfrau und Andere Grotesken (Rosa, The Constable’s Comely Wife, and other Grotesques) (1913).
Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender (1871–1946), was a perfectly functioning split personality: a serious philosopher by day (author of Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine Intellektuelle Biographie [Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual Biography], Kant für Kinder [Kant for Children] and his magnum opus, a study of Schopenhauer, titled Schöpferische Indifferenz [Creative Indifference]) and a literary absurdist by night who took the pen-name Mynona (Anonym, the German word for anonymous, spelt backwards) to publish black-
humoured tales he called Grotesken, or grotesques. Born in the Prussian province of Posen, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Poznan, in Poland, the son of a Jewish physician, Salomo Friedlaender flitted between various activities, including insurance underwriting and the study of medicine, before settling on philosophy as his primary pursuit. Moving to Berlin, he soon found an outlet for his whimsical side, writing and delivering his grotesques at various Expressionist-inspired and Dadaist-leaning cafés. The grotesques were collected during his lifetime in some twenty books. In 1933 he and his wife emigrated to Paris, where he managed to elude the Gestapo – his wife was not so lucky – and where he died in poor health and dire poverty in 1946.
‘The Seamstress’ (‘Die Näherin’), by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of his early stories, was first published in 1894.
Born in Prague, Bohemia, then an eastern dominion of the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire, René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, aka Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), is best known for his poetic works, notably his cycles, the prose poems Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) and verse series Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus). But his fiction, notably his semi-autobiographical novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), a modernist masterpiece that paved the way for the likes of Robert Musil, is no less remarkable in form and content. The inspiration for the novel was the time Rilke spent in Paris as the secretary to sculptor Auguste Rodin, whom he revered. Rodin later fired Rilke for taking the liberty of engaging in personal exchanges with Rodin’s correspondents. A lifelong nomad, Rilke roamed around Europe and spent a formative time at the Château de Muzot in the commune of Veyras, in Switzerland, where he completed the aforementioned poetic cycles.
‘The Onion’ (‘Die Zwiebel’), by Kurt Schwitters, was first published in the German literary review Der Sturm in 1919. An anti-Märchen conceived as a textual collage of assorted shreds of advertisements, truisms and diatribes, it portrays the artist as sacrificial lamb who gets his own in the end by reassembling his severed parts.
Born in Hanover, painter, sculptor, designer, composer and poet Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) was best known for his collages in image, word and tone. A true ‘realist’ of the twentieth century, he presented the fragmented reality of culture’s collapse. Condemned by the Nazis as an entarteter (degenerate) artist, Schwitters fled first to Norway and then to England, where he was briefly interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien and earned a meagre living through portrait-painting. ‘I sympathize with nonsense,’ he once said. Or as he put it in a letter: ‘We play till death takes us away.’
‘Rune Mountain’ (‘Der Runenberg’), by Ludwig Tieck, first appeared in the Taschenbuch für Kunst und Laune (Pocket Compendium for Art and Spirit), 1804, and was, thereafter, included in the volume Phantasus (1812), a collection of Tieck’s fantastic tales.
Born in Berlin, the poet, translator, critic, editor and author of novellas Johann Ludwig Tieck, aka Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), was one of the leading proponents of German Romanticism. In addition to his own compositions, he is known for his translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, as well as plays by William Shakespeare for an edition begun by August Wilhelm von Schlegel that subsequently became a standard of German literature. He also edited a posthumous edition of the work of Heinrich von Kleist.
‘The Time Saver’ (‘Der Zeitsparer’), by Ignaz Wrobel, aka Kurt Tucholsky, originally appeared in the author’s second book, Der Zeitsparer. Grotesken, in 1914.
Journalist, satirist, poet, sceptic, critic, the native-born Berliner Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935) was as much the voice of 1920s Berlin as artist Georg Grosz was its eyes. Like his literary forebear and role model, the poet Heinrich Heine, Tucholsky was a reluctant lawyer by training and a Jewish convert to Christianity by expedience, who never practised either. A master of the short prose form called Feuilleton, Tucholsky dished out his acerbic wit under various pseudonyms (Ignaz Wrobel, Theobald Tiger, Peter Panter, Kasper Hauser, et al.), enlivening the pages of the left-liberal Berliner Tagesblatt, the weekly Die Weltbühne and other papers, until the Nazis appeared on the scene and laughter went out of fashion. Tucholsky fled to Sweden, and, in despair at the inability of words to combat the evil in his native land, took his own life. One of the last entries in his journal reads: ‘If I were to die now, I’d say to myself: “Was that all?” And: “I didn’t really get the point of it.” And: “It was a little loud.” ’
‘The Kiss’ (‘Der Kuß I’), by Robert Walser, first appeared in the journal Deutsche Monatshefte in April 1913.
Robert Walser (1878–1956), one of the most enigmatic and elusive writers of the German language, was born in Biel, Switzerland, into a family with many children and a history of mental illness, to which his mother, two brothers and he himself finally succumbed. Never having completed his formal education, he worked at various low-level positions, including junior clerk, and trained to become a butler, writing all the while. Admired by Robert Musil, Kurt Tucholsky, Hermann Hesse and Franz Kafka, among others, Walser moved to Berlin, where he scraped together a modest living and enjoyed a brief period of limited acclaim for his novels and the short stories and whimsical reflections he regularly published in newspapers. Returning to Switzerland, he continued to write, especially reflections inspired by long solitary walks. A loner by temperament, Walser grew increasingly weary of worldly ways, and in 1929, suffering from acute anxiety, followed by a nervous breakdown, entered the mental home of Waldau, whence he was later moved, against his will, to the sanatorium at Herisau, where he died of a heart attack during a stroll in the snow. The man and his remarkable prose might best be characterized by his own description of a character in his novel Jakob von Gunten: ‘He speaks like a bungled somersault and behaves like a big, bunched-up impossibility in human form.’ Or as Elias Canetti once wrote of him: ‘His writing is a tireless attempt to conceal fear.’
‘The Experiment or the Victory of the Children’ (‘Das Experiment oder der Sieg der Kinder’), by Unica Zürn, was among the stories she wrote from 1949 to 1955 for various Berlin newspapers.
Writer, novelist, poet, painter, draughtswoman, Nora Berta Unica Ruth Zürn, aka Unica Zürn (1916–70), lived a lifelong flirtation with madness that finally ended with a leap out of the window of a Paris apartment. Born in Berlin, she worked as a secretary and later as an advertising scenarist for UFA, the German film studio, before leaving regular employment behind to scrape together a meagre living writing short prose for newspapers and radio plays. Marrying the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, the two moved to Paris, where they frequented surrealist salons. Zürn began to paint and draw and exhibited her work. She also wrote anagrams. At one point she contemplated abandoning writing and devoting herself entirely to visual art. A stormy marriage was interspersed with several stays at sanatoria. At the time of his death, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was working on a movie based on her autobiographical short novel Dunkler Frühling (Dark Spring).
Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to use the following copyrighted works:
Bachmann, Ingeborg, ‘The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran’ (‘Die Geheimnisse der Prinzessin von Kagran’), excerpted from Malina, a novel (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1971), published with the permission of Suhrkamp Verlag and Holmes & Meier.
Borchert, Wolfgang, ‘The Dandelion’ (‘Die Hundeblume’), from Die Hundeblume, Erzählungen aus unseren Tagen (Hamburgische Bücherei, Hamburg, 1947); Die Hundeblume (Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbeck, 1986), published with the permission of Rowohlt Verlag and New Directions.
Celan, Paul, ‘Shadowlight’ (‘Gegenlicht’), from Gesammelte Werke (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1983), published with the permission of Eric Celan and Suhrkamp Verlag.
Kaiser, Georg, ‘The Island of Eternal Life’ (‘Die Insel der Tausenjährigen Menschen’) (Ullstein Verlag, Berlin, 1943), published with the permission of Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin.
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br /> Kisch, Egon Erwin, ‘The Tattooed Portrait’ (‘Das Tätowierte Porträt’), excerpted from Marktplatz der Sensationen (Aufbau Verlag, Berlin, 1967), published with the permission of Aufbau Verlag.
Laederach, Jürg, ‘Conversation’, from Laederachs 69 Arten den Blues zu spielen (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1984), published with the permission of Suhrkamp Verlag.
Mynona, aka Salomo Friedlaender, ‘The Magic Egg’ (‘Das Wunder-Ei’) and ‘A New Kind of Plaything’ (‘Neues Kinderspielzeug’), excerpted from Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona, Gesammelte Schriften in 30 Bänden, Band 7, Grotesken I (hrsg. von Hartmut Geerken and Detlef Thiel, in Zusammenarbeit mit der Kant-Forschungsstelle der Universität Trier, Waitawhile, 2008), published with the permission of Hartmut Geerken and Waitawhile.
Schwitters, Kurt, ‘The Onion’ (‘Die Zwiebel’, Merzgedicht 8), from Anna Blume und ich (Arche Verlag, Zürich, 1965), published with the permission of DuMont Buchverlag GmbH & Co., KG, Cologne.
