Seagull Books is a remarkable Kolkata-based publisher that has such a broad and diverse catalog of world literatures that it stretches the definition of a small press. For several years, I’ve been picking up copies of titles from their Library of German Literature list, in part because I’ve been following contemporary (meaning post-1945, which may now be stretching the definition of contemporary) German(language) literature since The New Yorker published Max Frisch’s The Man in the Holocene in entirety in one of their issues (or am I holocene-ating that?) and partly because I love the lively geometric designs of their covers. (If someone can identify the designer responsible in a comment, please do.) While there are a fair number of 300+ page books in the list, there are plenty that fall within the wafer-thin range, so I thought I’d take an opportunity to highlight ten titles well worth considering putting on your TBR list.
Porcelain by Durs Grünbein, translated by Karen Leeder (90 pages)
Through Durs Grünbein was born in Dresden in 1962 and his mother had only faint memories of the event, the Allied fire-bombing of the city in February 1945 was embedded in the collective memory of the city. Its ruins were everywhere and even many intact structures showed the marks of the inferno. Every February, East German television ran the same old travelogue film of pre-war Dresden:
Every year in February it touches on a nerve,
that distant call of the Lorelei: Dresden, Dresden…
Silent film on late-night TV and there it is: archive
of the city as it was, unharmed: no consolation.
Off to watch the newsreels, passers-by, no idea what
was to come, flâneurs, stylish ladies, invalids.
There, in Postplatz: trams, a bicycle, horse and cart,
a cinematic world filled with Dietrichs, Buster Keatons.
Resplendent on the Altmarkt Square, only Germania
stands above the traffic like a diva straight from Wagner.
I suspect that this film on the Internet Archive is the one Grünbein remembers. But even if it’s not, I highly recommend watching it after reading Porcelain, as you will recognize places mentioned in the poem and better grasp the magnitude of the city’s loss.
Biography: A Game by Max Frisch, translated by Birgit Schreyer Duarte (124 pages)
Biography is a play first produced in 1967. Frisch was unsatisfied with it and later revised it significantly—this is the version in this translation. Which is sort of ironic, since the subject of the play is the choices we make in our lives. Hannes Kürmann, a behavioral scientist, is given the opportunity to reconsider some fundamental decision points in his life and to take a different course:
Recorder. Why are you losing your nerve? You didn’t lose it then. On the contrary, you married. [A Bride in white appears.] Spring 1940: back in Europe to do your military service, you meet your first wife, who later commits suicide. [Kürmann does not look around.] Would you like to make a different choice here?
Bride: Hannes—
Recorder: Katrin Guggenbühl, twenty-one, blonde with freckles, only child of a pharmacist—you remember? According to the dossier, you knew on the day of the church wedding that the marriage was a mistake. [Wedding bells.] Would you like to make a different choice here?
Apparently part of Frisch’s frustration was related to his own sense that choice is mostly an illusion. But as Kürmann learns, even if one were to exercise choice freely, we have no control over the choices of others—which is pretty much indistinguishable from having no choice in the first place.
The Cold Centre by Inka Parei, translated by Katy Derbyshire (158 pages)
The cold center in Parei’s novel is the air conditioning plant in East Berlin where the narrator has worked dutifully for years as a technician. But the narrative takes place within a short period of time, barely a day, in which he desperately attempts to locate a man, an acquaintance from twenty years ago. For the day before, the news of the nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl reached East Germany and the man may be able to tell him if his wife, now being treated in a cancer clinic, was exposed to nuclear radiation in her past work. It’s both something of a thriller and a parable for the ways in which the security state of the DDR could destroy the lives of its people.
Air Raid by Alexander Kluge, translated by Martin Chalmers (138 pages)
On April 8, 1945, 13-year-old Alexander Kluge witnessed his town of Halberstadt, a mid-sized city of no special military importance, destroyed by an American raid of bombers that—as was later learned—had been diverted from its primary target. Although this is a deeply personal book, it’s also a superb example of Kluge’s multi-dimensional approach to his subjects. He draws upon the oral histories of survivors, contemporary news accounts, photographs, maps, operational instructions from the Eighth Air Force, even illustrations of the types of bombs used and the flight patterns of the B-17 squadrons that participated in the attack. This edition includes an essay on the book, which was first published in 1977, by W. G. Sebald later incorporated in his The Natural History of Destruction.
On Tarrying by Joseph Vogl, translated by Helmut Müller-Sievers (152 pages)
I won’t claim to possess the depth of familiarity with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism or most of the other works of philosophy and cultural criticism that Joseph Vogl, but I think I understand his point in On Tarrying. In the simplest terms, we’re usually presented with just two possible responses to history: to concede its inevitable forward flow (which in its most optimistic form is sometimes called progressivism) or to push back against it (the way of the reactionary). Vogl suggests there is a third option: to tarry. This does not mean, he argues, to delay, which is just another form of reaction.
While tarrying in the Western tradition has always been pushed towards the side of indecisiveness and thus has been disqualified as a frustration of the “work;” it can be recognized as the active gesture of inquiry, in which the work, the action, the execution is comprehended not from the perspective of its enforcement but in the process of its emergence and becoming. Like a lost theme or anathema, tarrying seems to trace a blurred line that comes into precise focus wherever—in a long occidental history—a culture of action and of work is shattered and begins to reflect upon itself. Tarrying accompanies the imperative to act and to work like a shadow, like a ruinous antagonist.
Vogl draws upon Schiller, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, and other German writers to show that tarrying has long been with us, even if we hadn’t given it a name before.
Mr Zed’s Reflections by Hans Magnus Enzenberger, translated by Wieland Hoban (144 pages)
Mr Zed is a cheerful, chubby man who sits on a bench in a city park and offers his thoughts on the world to whoever will listen—apparently confident that his listeners will record them in all their wisdom. He is no Socrates, however. “If only for hygienic reasons, Z. changed his opinions more often than his shirt. As soon as they started to get black around the edges, he put them in the wash.” There is really no story here, though there is perhaps the merest of a structure. But it could also be a collection of 259 observations that Hans Magnus Enzenberger just felt like sharing with his readers. Well, it’s a much more interesting and entertaining alternative to trying to find someone worth listening to in your neighborhood bar.
One Day a Year by Christa Wolf, translated by Katy Derbyshire (128 pages)
During an interview in 1960, Christa Wolf was asked to describe what she did on September 27th. The question stuck with her and she decided to take time on September 27th of each year thereafter to record a diary entry—an inventive alternative for those like me who always lose steam on a daily diary by the end of the first week. Her entries from 1960 to 2000 were published by Europa Editions in 2007 in a translation by Lowell A. Bangerter as One Day. This book collects her entries from 2001 (with September 11th still fresh in mind) until her death in 2011. Wolf reminds us that even our recent past was much the same chaotic mess as our present:
Following the usual morning rituals, the newspaper. Headlines: whether the United States will start a war in Iraq; eight killed in new Middle East violence; genocide indictment against Miloševic in The Hague; Israeli rocket attack on Hamas. In the Berlin supplement: 48,000 runners expected at Sunday’s marathon; moth-infested horse-chestnut leaves composted; literature night at the city baths. And so on, and so on.
But her own work—her last novel, City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud—as well as the tolls of increasing age also factor in this coda to the much longer One Day.
Ludwig’s Room by Alois Hotschnig, translated by Tess Lewis (146 pages)
Ludwig’s room is in the lakeside house left Kurt by his great-uncle. From his childhood, Kurt remembers his uncle Georg locking himself in the room—and locking Kurt out. Who was Ludwig, Kurt would ask. Georg would never answer. Now, as he sifts through the papers in the private sanctum, he comes to realize that his family’s past—and that of the local villagers—is wrapped up in secrets of collaboration and resistance, suicide and murder. Another wafer-thinner to file under “Things are not as they seem” (see Michael Arkwright’s The Roundabout).
The Blue Soda Siphon by Urs Widmer, translated by Donal McLaughlin (112 pages)
An interesting twist on the Freaky Friday premise (or to be pedantically accurate, the Vice Versa premise) in which parent and child switch places, Widmer’s 53-year-old narrator finds himself transported to 1941 Switzerland, where he has a tough time convincing his parents that he is their son. They’re distraught because their three-year-old son has disappeared (to 1991 Switzerland, though none of them knows that). The three-year-old somewhat miraculously finds his way to his adult self’s home, where he tries to explain to his daughter that he’s her father. If you’re already confused by this explanation, the fault is mine. Somehow in Widmer’s hands, it not only manages to make sense but also offers a touching reminder of how much of our lives we lose in the process of living them.
Requiem for Ernst Jandl by Friederike Mayröcker, translated by Rosalyn Theobald (80 pages)
Fellow poets Jandl and Mayröcker left their marriages in 1954 and lived as a couple, though perhaps fellow muses might be a more accurate description, since they chose not to live together. When Jandl died in 2000. Mayröcker then channeled her grief into a series of works, of which this linked group of poems is one. Though they inspired each other, their styles were quite different. Jandl has sometimes been described as a concrete poet, but it’s more accurate to say that he tried to strip his poetry down to the barest skeletons:
die stelle (the place)
(there i sit down
in order to make a poem
there i sit
in order to make a poem
there i have sat
in order to make a poem
there it has come into being
there it has failed)
Jandle could make Samuel Beckett seems long-winded. Mayröcker’s poetry, on the other hand, often reads like prose, and she prefered to explore than excise. The central poem in the book, for example, takes a four-line poem by Jandl and spins it into a five-page meditation on physical memories and the inevitable losses in every life. Though she has a reputation for being a challenging writer, in Requiem for Ernst Jandl, perhaps because of the context, her writing is quite accessible and moving.
The designer is Sunandini Banerjee. She is both senior Editor AND designer of all our books.