This is the second installment of a list of books and writers who should be translated into English, but haven’t yet been. Part 1 (direct link here) listed a number of contemporary writers and books: Reinhard Jirgl’s Abschied von den Feinden, Patrick Roth’s Christus Trilogie, Hartmut Lange’s Das Konzert and Thomas Stangl’s Was Kommt.
Part 2 will feature more classical writers, and spans a far greater period of time, from a book published in 1767, to one, published posthumously, in 1967. With classical writers it’s hard to guess which writers, torn from the immediate cultural and linguistic context, will or could be successful, and worth reading. A lot of writers will fall by the wayside, such as Jean Paul, who is a stunning writer, possibly the best prose writer of his time, but whose extremely long epics of the bourgeois life may not connect well enough with the Anglophone reader. By the same measure I skipped a few extraordinary plays, such as H.L Wagner’s shocking Kindermörderin, a play about a young woman who, left by her lover, kills her newborn child. It’s in many ways proto-modern, laced with a complex social criticism, with images of violence (almost an onstage rape, the brutal murder of the child), and additionally, Wagner lets his heroine take the place that in his time, men occupied. It’s sensational, and both a challenging and engrossing read, but I’m not convinced that it makes as much of an impact on readers who have not read canonical plays like Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen or Schiller’s The Robbers. There are countless more books like that.
The four books below, however, should be translated. You’ll notice that 3 out of the 4 were written (though not published) at roughly the same time. That was one of the most fecund periods of German fiction, yet one of the most neglected, as far as translation are concerned. It’s a shame that these books in particular haven’t yet been Englished, and it’s a loss to Anglophone readers everywhere.
Part 2: Classics
Alfred Döblin, Berge, Meere und Giganten (1932)
Döblin was, above all, a craftsman, and, in equal measures, dedicated to literature and to his political convictions. His work, from early expressionistic stories like Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, to his three-volume epic about the November Revolution in Germany in 1918, touches on a vast array of subjects, and is written in a variety of ways. He is best known for the aforementioned story and his novel Berlin, Alexanderplatz, a mad masterpiece of a book, completely written and constructed in a montage, a technique that he had been playing around with for decades and finally perfected in Berlin, Alexanderplatz. The great amount of different registers and voices and dialects that swamp that particular book make it enormously hard to translate properly, but this one has at least been translated. Among his other masterpieces, for me, two stick out: one would be his biographical novel about Wallenstein, which provides a history of that grand character of the 30 Years’ War, imbued with social criticism and a careful awareness. Less well known than Wallenstein, however, is his gargantuan (in every sense) utopian novel Berge, Meere und Giganten. It’s set up to be a projective history of mankind. In about 600 pages, Döblin races through centuries of upheaval, and we soon notice that most of this is not earnest speculative fiction, it’s expressionistic madness. In order to make the threats understandable that the modern age holds for us, Döblin goes overboard. Civil wars, political reformations, and later, natural disasters plague humanity, until the dinosaurs (yes) walk the earth again. This isn’t a mere novel about an idea or a few ideas, this is a huge explosion of one of the best minds of German literature. One idea races the other, one plot the next and we read on, breathlessly, trying to find out what will become of humanity. This is a spectacular book, one that breaks smaller lights like Jules Verne or Alfred Kubin into pieces. It tells us about the true potential of us human beings, it’s awash with decades of thought, yet it reads like a bestseller. And below it all, the thunderous river of Döblin’s language rumbles. Break out the seat belts, get on for this ride. I mean it, you need to read this book. And I’m honestly bewildered why it hasn’t yet been translated. The scope and depth of it puts contemporary writers like William Vollmann to shame. Really. Translate it.
Additional links
Buy this book on amazon? Link
Read Döblin’s German Wiki page? Link
Read Döblin’s English Wiki page? Link
Rudolf Borchardt, Jamben (1935/1967)
Borchardt is an oddity. Part of circles formed around the two masters of literature in German at the time, Stefan George and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he was both venerated and hated. He was a man of contradictions, as a Jew, who had been generally read as a proto-fascist, whose last speeches seemed to hail Hitler’s arrival from afar. A renowned cultural scholar, widely praised and admired for his titanic knowledge, he, and those like him, resurrected a German tradition that the Romantics had tried to establish first, a metaphysical German-ness; this reading of his work, however, is deficient, but many people didn’t notice this, until in 1967 his long poem, Jamben, was published. It is a series of smaller poems written in a form that can be called Jamben in German, but are usually called epodes. An epode, a carmen maledictum, is usually written to abuse or vilify someone; in modern usage, by poets such as André Chénier, it has become more vituperative, more angry, more political. Chénier called the form “l’épode vengeresse”. And so it is here as well: Borchardt’s Jamben are an all-out attack on the rising wave of hate, on the new politics in Germany. They were written to the backdrop of the Nuremberg Laws, which were declared the same year. They reveal what a complex writer Borchardt was all along, and that he was content to let contradictions simmer in the literary delicacies he cooked up. Borchardt is one of those German writers with the most intricate knowledge of the German language and German literary tradition. His work, especially his stellar Dante translation, is almost unbearably complex in purely linguistic terms. That doesn’t mean he’s hard to read, but in his work, every word seems fraught with references, puns, and ambiguities; and usually, he’s uninterested in producing a finished work of art. He started lots of projects and was content to finish them in his head; accordingly, much of what he actually published evinces a certain disregard for his audience. Not so the Jamben. They are songs of anger, and although they, again, bear the full weight of German tradition, here we see him trow it at someone, writing not because he can do it, but because he needs to. You don’t need to understand, to ‘get’ German history to ‘get’ these poems. They speak, no, they sing, scream, shout, declaim, whisper for themselves. Jamben is one of the most powerful pieces of poetry published this century, in any language, and although it needs a good translator, it can and does translate to other languages. Everyone should read it. It’s inspiring, haunting, great literature.
Additional links
Buy this book on amazon? Link
Read Borchardt’s German Wiki page? Link
Christoph Martin Wieland, Agathon (1767)
This is an incredible book, and Wieland is one of German literature’s most underrated genii. Wieland had a long productive career, and there are a few standout books in his work, but the publication of Agathon shows him at his most readable, most complex best. Fresh from having published a successful novel that was inspired by Cervantes, he wrote a book that stands among the most important and most influential German books ever written. It inspired the first extant theory of the Bildungsroman, and until Goethe published Wilhelm Meister, it was generally regarded as the pre-eminent German novel. Agathon is a novel like no other one. It contains material for several other books, as it charts a young man’s search for enlightenment in the tempestuous landscapes of Ancient Greece. There are long discussions of Greek philosophy, erotic games, politics and pirates! Agathon is the work of a writer born into the wrong period of time. Like Melville, Wieland’s complexities are astonishingly modern. Here, as in other books of his, his psychology is subtly wrought and reminds the reader of modern theories of mass and individual psychology. His characters appear to be written with Nietzsche’s philosophy in mind, and it all is written to a backdrop of sin and lust that is beyond simple bawdy games. Wieland, as we quickly see, debates modern theories of sex, gender and sexuality with the language and images of his time; Schlegel’s Florentin could not have been written about it. Wieland went on to revise it three times, softening the impact, imparting upon his narrative the wisdom he won through the years, but there’s no doubt that the first draft is the best one, the least harmoniously reconciled. Agathon is fundamentally contradictory, a book defying tradition and definition. Like Jahnn, Wieland’s other books became more expansive, more complex iterations of the ideas contained in this long but overwhelmingly dense masterpiece. If you can read German read Wieland! Or translate him. Through his heavy influence on the early German novel, he influenced world literature. It’s time the world read him!
Additional links
Read my review of Agathon? Link
Buy this book on amazon? Link
Read Wieland’s German Wiki page? Link
Read Wieland’s English Wiki page? Link
Buy another masterpiece of Wieland’s, Geschichte der Abderiten, in French translation? Link
Hans Henny Jahnn, Perrudja (1929)
I’ll just start with this: Hans Henny Jahnn is the single most underrated writer of the 20th century. Oh, yes, no doubt about it. He has written 5 truly great and mind-blowing plays and a few more very good ones. He has written two mind-blowing, game-changing novels. He has written a handful of mind-blowing shorter prose pieces. Of all that, only one play is still in print in an affordable edition in German. What translations exist into English barely scratches the surface of this man’s great work. It’s a shame. I repeat: it’s a shame. To single out one book of all them is hard, because all of them deserve to be read, translated, and passed around. However, I do understand if translator are careful when it comes to translating his opus magnum, Fluß Ohne Ufer, a sprawling trilogy of over 2000 pages, unfinished, and hard to sum up. Granted, it’s the best German novel of the past century, but that doesn’t make it easier to translate or sell. I understand that. Keeping all this in mind, however, I definitely do not understand why Jahnn’s first novel, the burning meteor that is Perrudja, has not been translated yet. Perrudja is, like Döblin’s novel, about the conditio humana, and about the threats that modernity has to offer the individual trapped in its machinery. But it takes a very different tack. Instead of looking forward, it looks backward: it’s gorged with myth and history. In Perrudja, there’s a main story, a suspenseful story at that, but there are also numerous smaller stories inserted into the main story, who elaborate upon the topics of the main story. Jahnn is an obsessive writer, obsessed with sexuality, religion, history, and violence, and Perrudja can be described as an epic of the body as it deals with all these elements inasmuch as they form part of our culture. It’s one of the most potent novels about how homosexuality is affected by the repressive modern society. Jahnn examines how our culture, behavior, history are permeated with violence, but his book isn’t bleak or negative. Jahnn believes in the potential of humanity for good, and this belief runs through every page of this incredible book. This is a book that will swallow you whole, a genuinely great read, and a great novel. Jahnn writes in a style that is both mythic and modern, and the result is a great, mad, colorful dream. Perrudja is a challenging read but an engaging one, a book that you can’t and shouldn’t miss. Read Jahnn, translate him. It’s shocking that he hasn’t already been translated.
Additional links
Read my review of Perrudja? Link
Buy this book in French translation? Link
Read Jahnn’s German Wiki page? Link
Read Jahnn’s English Wiki page? Link
Read Kebad Kenya, the only English blog dedicated to Jahnn’s work? Link
Please also read Part 1: direct link here
Among living German prose writers, Hartmut Lange is something of an oddity. He is what you’d call a writer’s writer, not really appreciated by critics, except in what must be described as a glancing way, not particularly successful with the public, but adored by writers such as Monika Maron and many other heavyweights. But, and here’s the odd thing, he doesn’t read like many other ‘writers’ writers’ do. He is a smooth, highly accomplished writer, a creator of taut and incredibly focused little works of art, texts that, at the same time, are light as feathers. There are few writers out there than can wear their erudition and their technical finesse this lightly and at the same time stun the reader who realizes what it is that has fallen into his lap there. Hartmut Lange should be one of Germany’s most celebrated writers, he’s one of its finest writers anyway, and Der Abgrund des Endlichen (~ The Abyss of the Finite), his most recent publication, certainly confirms this. Lange, these past decades, has become primarily a writer of stories and novellas, mainly novellas, and not since the days of Paul Heyse has this country known as dedicated a writer of novellas as Hartmut Lange and in his new book, he publishes three of them.
All major literatures have writers in the critical spotlight, who reap all the laurels, who command all the attention. As a rule of thumb, you can find all of them on the idiotic lists of people complaining about how (and to whom) the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded. And each of these literatures also has excellent second-tier writers, writers who are as good or better than those in the spotlight but who, for some reason or other, despite good reviews and decent enough sales never quite broke through. In Germany, one of those writers is Hartmut Lange. The excellence of his work deserves a wide audience, critical and popular, yet ever well-read people can be puzzled when asked about him. In recent interviews, Lange himself has turned to complaining about the critical bias against him and grumbling about his work being simply too ‘bold’ for the success that has been denied to him for decades. This is not to say that Lange has been altogether without success. He started his career as a playwright in the GDR, where he was successful, both with audiences as well as with critics. He won a major prize yet he then fell out of love with the ruling ideology and, in 1965, did not return from one of his trips to West Germany.
Another sign of his mastery is his use of the form of the novella. Instead of just putting out a piece of prose that’s too short to be a novel and too long to be a story, and slapping on it the label ‘novella’, he writes, consciously, a novella, a tight piece of prose. Theodor Storm, one of the most important writers in that form in German literature, called the novella “the sister of drama” and “the strictest kind of prose writing”, which is organized through a conflict that’s at the center of the whole construction. I’ve a feeling Hartmut Lange shares that view. Das Konzert is so tight that it’s, as with all books that are written this well, hard to imagine it being any longer despite the fact that the subject could make for quite a long novel. Lange, however, chose a structure and a central organizing metaphor that allows him to write a book of just over a hundred and thirty pages about a topic as vast and expansive as guilt and redemption after the atrocities of the Second World War. Although there are several concerts, the eponymous concert comes at the end, almost unannounced, unexpected, even, but we the readers still see that the whole book’s structure hangs on that concert and its outcome. The book even employs short bursts of violence but although that violence can seem harmless, it has a much more harsh effect on the readers. Again, as with other things, Lange makes the utmost of his use of violence.
Basically, for all we know, in Lange’s Ghost Berlin, there’s only dead Nazis and dead Jews (not all of them murdered, Liebermann died in his sleep). Most of the Nazis are deeply remorseful for what they did. Many of them, after all, did it for a higher cause, ‘saving the German race’ and it took death to show them the horrible delusion they were under. The passages dealing with this recognition are potent statements on the longevity (or the lack of it, as it happens) of ideologies, of death canceling out some illusions. The Nazis are the pariahs of Ghost Berlin, ashamed of themselves and shunned by the other occupants of the city. Schulze-Bethmann is one of the few who has regular contacts to them. As it turns out, the Nazis have as much interest in Lewanski regaining his powers as Frau Altenschul. They think that if he manages to mature as an artist despite their murdering him they will be saved, in a way. Art will free them, make them less contemptible. In the end, Lewanski has the choice between attending one of two concerts. One in front of Frau Altenschul and a large audience assembling to hear him, and one in front of an army of dead Nazis, hiding in what used to be the Führerbunker. His failure to play the piece he set out to play dashes the Nazis’ hopes and contains a direct indictment of Germans’ attempts in Lange’s time and the decade after the book’s publication, to extricate themselves from responsibility by erecting monuments and installing rituals of remembrance in schools.
(Bild stammt von 
shigekuni. 
