Castle Gripsholm - 1931- by Kurt Tucholsky- 244 Pages- translated from the German by Michael Hofmann -2019

 

Castle Gripsholm - 1931- by Kurt Tucholsky- 244 Pages- translated from the German by Michael Hofmann -2019

KURT TUCHOLSKY (1890–1935) was born in Berlin to a middle-class Jewish family. He received a law degree from the University of Jena in 1915 and was conscripted to fight in World War I not long after

. A notably poor soldier, his aphorism likening soldiers to murderers became a pacifist rallying cry. Tucholsky began his journalism career while still a student, and he found success writing in a range of forms, including the feuilleton, criticism, satire, poetry, and lyrics for cabarets. Under both his name and various pseudonyms, his work frequently appeared in the leftist intellectual organ Die Weltbühne Tucholsky’s collected writings amount to thousands of pages and include a play, Christopher Columbus (1932); an illustrated book, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles (1929); and two works of fiction, Rheinsberg (1912) and Castle Gripsholm (1931). He was married twice, to Else Weil from 1920 to 1924 and to Mary Gerold in 1924. In 1933, his last piece for Die Weltbühne appeared in January; by August his German citizenship had been annulled and his books burned en masse. The Nazis had denounced him as “one of the most wicked of literary pornographers.”

 He divorced Mary to distance her from Nazi persecution and lived in exile in Sweden on short-term visas under threat of deportation, where he died from an overdose of sleeping pills. There are two annual literary awards given in his name: the Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize and Germany’s Kurt Tucholsky Prize.

Castle Gripsholm is Tucholsky’s only novel, his longest single piece of work of any kind. As a critic, he had a very high regard for the form, and so, despite his modesty in not claiming the tag for himself, tribute should be paid to the skill of this one (which has sold three-quarters of a million copies). More than anything else, it is a beautifully plausible version of what it pretends to be: ‘a summer story’ – the plainest and clearest and liveliest of first-person writing – full of fresh air, sunshine, trees, companionableness and friendly bickering – sweet oblivion. But, in the light of its author’s other preoccupations, commitments and achievements, and of the date itself – two years later he would be stripped of his citizenship and his books would be burned – can this withdrawal, this holiday, this compliance with his ‘publisher’s’ wishes, can it be real? It is real, though the reality is wishful. That the sales of his books really did matter more than what he was trying to achieve in writing them. That it would be possible to turn away from politics, and to forget what was happening, in some serene privacy. That the struggle in Germany and for Germany could take place on some manageably small and symbolic level, like the struggle for Ada. That his privacy would indeed be serene . . . Castle Gripsholm is a book by a man who was never a father himself, and in whose life there were many women.

Available in The New York City Public Library 

"A Man Becomes a Nazi" - 10 Pages-A Short Story by Anna Seghers - 1943 - translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo - 2021

 "A Man Becomes a Nazi" - A Short Story by Anna Seghers -  - - 1943 - 

translated from the German and edited by Margot Bettauer Dembo.- 2021

This will be my 12th year as a participant in Germans Literature Month, held every November.  Through the event I have discovered many new to me authors.

Born: November 19, 1900, Mainz, Germany

Died: June 1, 1983 (age 82 years), East Berlin

Born Netty Reiling in Mainz in 1900 of partly Jewish descent, she married Laszlo Radvanyi, a Hungarian Communist in 1925.

In Cologne and Heidelberg she studied history, the history of art and Chinese. She joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1928, at the height of its struggle against the burgeoning National Socialist German Workers Party. Her 1932 novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic warning of the dangers of Fascism, which led to her being arrested by the gestapo.

 After German troops invaded the French Third Republic in 1940, she fled to Marseilles and one year later to Mexico, where she founded the anti-fascist 'Heinrich-Heine-Klub', named after the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and founded Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), an academic journal. During this time, she wrote The Seventh Cross, for which she received the Büchner-Prize in 1947. The novel is set in 1936 and describes the escape of seven prisoners from a concentration camp. It was published in the United States in 1942 and produced as a movie in 1944 by MGM starring Spencer Tracy. The Seventh Cross was one of the very few depictions of Nazi concentration camps, in either literature or the cinema, during World War 

In 1947, Anna Seghers returned to Germany, moved to West Berlin, and became a member of the SED in the zone occupied by the Soviets. In 1950, she moved to East Berlin and became a co-founder of the freedom movement of the GDR. In 1951, she received the first Nationalpreis der DDR and the "Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Jena" in 1959. In 1981, she became "Ehrenbürgerin" of her native town Mainz.

During prior German Literature Months I have posted upon two of her novels, Transit and The Seventh Cross.

“A Man Becomes a Nazi,” written in 1942 and 1943 in Mexico, explores the question: How does a person become a torturer and murderer? Within a tightly controlled narrative frame, the story ventures out into unstable terrain. Fritz Mueller’s life unrolls in front of a Red Army tribunal: “He was charged with shootings, hangings, and a series of acts of cruelty committed against women and children.

  This German, the fourth son of a soldier and unemployed metalworker, is born into a continuum of war and hardship. It is impossible to say what plays the greatest role in making him a Nazi—his circumstances, his education, his predispositions?. He becomes a cold blooded killer in a war against people he thought were enemies of Germany.

There are 15 other stories in the collection. I hope to post this month upon a few of them.

Mel u

The Reading Life

The Reading Life Review October 2024 -

 

The Reading Life Review October 2024 

Nonfiction Featured in October 

1. Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings  - 2020 - 432 Pages 

2. The Snakehead : An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe —2009 - 252 Pages

3.Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe - 2021- 633 Pages 

4.The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio- 2020 - 

5. Wine and War: the French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure by Don and Petie Kladstrup.- 2002 - 334 Pages 

6. Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley - 2024 - 233 Pages

7. Everyone Who is Gone is Here : the United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer.-2024 -544 Pages

October Novels

1.The Book Lovers Library by Madeline Martin - 2024 - 396 Pages

2. When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - by Alice Hoffman- 2024 - 192 Pages

3.The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain- 2015 - 244 Pages

4. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver- 2022- 720 Pages

October Short Stories - all by Carol Shields - included in the Stories of Carol Shields - 2004

1. "Good Manners"

2. "Collision" 

Birth County of October Authors 

1, USA- 7

2. Canada - 1

3, China - 1

4. England - 1

Four October authors are men, 7 were featured for the first time and only one is no longer living.

Blog Stats

As of today our posts have been viewed 8,164,356 times. In October there was 79,212 page views.

Per Google Stats the origin countries in October were 

1. Singapore

2. USA

3. India

4. Philippines 

5. Canada

6. United kingdom 

7. Hong Kong 

8. Brazil 

9. France

10. Russia

Of the ten post viewed posts 9 were on stories by South East Asian and Indian authors, one on an Irish story.

"Good Manors" - A Short Story by Carol Shields -5 Pages - Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection, it is my hope to read and post on them all.

"In all of her fiction, Carol Shields excels at character creation. She conjures up a character in a few lines of dialogue, in a pungent authorial aside." Penelopy Lively from her introduction to Stone Diaries by Carol Shields 

"Good Manors" is the 32nd Short Story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted.  I found it to be a disturbingly haunting work that in five pages tracks a ten year old child, almost molested by an older neighbour up to her sixties. She never marries and never forms an enduring relationship though she has brief encounters in which she is used for sex.

"THE STERN, PEREMPTORY SOCIAL ARBITER, Georgia Willow, has been overseeing Canadian manners for thirty-five years. She did it in Montreal during the tricky fifties and she did it in Toronto in the unsettled sixties. In the seventies she operated underground, so to speak, from a converted Rosedale garage, tutoring the shy wives of Japanese executives and diplomats. In the eighties she came into her own; manners were rediscovered, particularly in the West, where Mrs. Willow has relocated. Promptly at three-thirty each Tuesday and Thursday, neatly dressed in a well-pressed navy Evan-Picone slub silk suit, cream blouse and muted scarf, Georgia Willow meets her small class in the reception area of the MacDonald Hotel and ushers them into the long, airy tearoom—called, for some reason, Gophers—where a ceremonial spread has been ordered. Food and drink almost always accompany Mrs. Willow’s lectures. It is purely a matter of simulation since, wherever half a dozen people gather, there is sure to be a tray of sandwiches to trip them up. According to Mrs. Willow, food and food implements are responsible for fifty percent of social unease. The classic olive pit question. The persisting problem of forks, cocktail picks and coffee spoons."

To me the enduring questions are whatever are good manors really meant to do, what purpose do they serve and why did Gloria Willow make teaching good manors her life work.

"Collision" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 16 Pages- Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

 

"Collision" - A Short Story by Carol Shields- 16 Pages- Included with The Short Stories of Carol Shields- 2004

Buriedinprint.com 

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,is doing a read through of the short stories of Carol Shields. I hope to participate fully in this event.

The more I read in the stories of Carol Shields the more grateful I am to Buried in Print for turning me on to her work. There are sixty some stories in the collection, it is my hope to read and post on them all.

"In all of her fiction, Carol Shields excels at character creation. She conjures up a character in a few lines of dialogue, in a pungent authorial aside." Penelopy Lively from her introduction to Stone Diaries by Carol Shields 

"Collision" is the 31st story by Carol Shields upon which I have posted, it perfectly exemplifies Penelopy Lively's description.

"Collision" is an amazing story, not just two lives created in 15 pages but the history of how movements of continents create biographies.

I wish to quote enough from the story to give a sense of her wonderful prose.

""TODAY THE SKY IS SOLID BLUE. It smacks the eye. A powerful tempered ceiling stretched across mountain ranges and glittering river systems: the Saône, the Rhine, the Danube, the Drina. This unimpaired blueness sharpens the edges of the tile-roofed apartment block where Martä Gjatä lives and hardens the wing tips of the little Swiss plane that carries Malcolm Brownstone to her side. What a dense, dumb, depthless blue it is, this blue; but continually widening out and softening like a magically reversed lake without a top or bottom or a trace of habitation or a thought of what its blueness is made of or what it’s for. But take another look. The washed clarity is deceiving, the yawning transparency is fake. What we observe belies the real nature of the earth’s atmosphere, which is adrift, today as any day, with biographical debris. It’s everywhere, a thick swimmy blizzard of it, more ubiquitous by far than earthly salt or sand or humming electrons. Radio waves are routinely pelted by biography’s mad static, as Martä Gjatä, trying to tune in the Vienna Symphony, knows only too well. And small aircraft, such as the one carrying Malcolm Brownstone eastward across Europe, occasionally fall into its sudden atmospheric pockets. The continents and oceans are engulfed. We are, to speak figuratively...

Where else in this closed lonely system can our creaturely dust go but up there on top of the storied slag heap? The only law of biography is that everything, every particle, must be saved. The earth is alight with it, awash with it, scoured by it, made clumsy and burnished by its steady accretion. Biography is a thrifty housewife, it’s an old miser. Martä Gjatä’s first toddling steps are preserved, and her first word"

"

When We Flew Away' A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - by Alice Hoffman- 2024 - 192 Pages

 When We Flew Away :A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - by Alice Hoffman- 2024 - 192 Pages

Alice Hoffman works I have so far read:

The Marriage of Opposites- 2015

"Everything My Mother Taught Me" - 2016

"The Book Store Sisters" -2022

The Foretelling - 2006

"Conjure" - 2014

Aquamarine- 2001

The Ice Queen - 2006

Property Of -1977

Skylight- 2007

The Invisible Hour 2023

Rules of Magic- 2017

Practical Magic - 1997

Faithful- 2016

When We Flew Away' A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary - 2024

The story begins in May of 1940. About to be eleven-year-old Anne is living in Amsterdam with her parents Edith and Otto as well as her 14-year sister Margot, and her grandmother 

 Her father had been a wealthy banker in Germany, but after the rise of antisemitism and the Nazi Party he moved his family to what they all thought was the safety of the Netherlands, one of the most tolerant countries in Europe. 

Anne and her sister attend schools that have both Jewish and Christian students and their lives are comfortable and happy. Margot is considered the beautiful sister (Anne doesn't mind) while Anne is the dreamer. As the Nazi Army begins its march across Europe, Otto regrets not sending the girls to England and is desperately trying to get visas for the family to go to America. But after the Germans invade the Netherlands, all hope of visas seems lost and there is no escape for the family. All Jews must now register with local governments, people they considered friends and classmates become enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi Party, men are being arrested and sent to concentration camps, and their rights are increasingly being taken away. Then the impossible happens. Nathan Strauss, Jr., an old friend of Otto's from New York City, writes to say all the paperwork for their visas in now in order. But once again their hopes for visas are shattered. There is some unexpected happiness for Anne as she meets a boy named Helmut, who's known as "Hello" because that's how he greets everyone. But Anne's happiness is short lived as Margot receives a notice that she's being called up for a "labor camp." The family has no choice, they leave under cover of darkness and go into hiding.

I was completely drawn into Hoffman's brilliant imagining of the life of Anne Frank Before she began her diary,  She loves to read, tries to keep optimistic and dreams of moving to California.

In a time when immigrants around the world are being vilified for all of societies problems there is a profound lesson in this wonderful book.

Alice Hoffman is the acclaimed author of over thirty novels for readers of all ages, including The Dovekeepers, The World That We Knew—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize—The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, Incantation, The Foretelling, and most recently, The Invisible Hour. Her previous novels for Scholastic Press are Aquamarine, which was made into a major motion picture, Indigo, Green Witch, and Green Angel, which Publishers Weekly, in a boxed, starred review, called “achingly lovely.” She lives outside Boston. Visit her online at www.alicehoffman.com.

Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings - 2020 -432 Pages

 Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings  - 2020 - 432 Pages 

March 16, Berlin, Germany 

February 17, 2006 - London, England 

Previously I have pasted upon two biographies of authors from Selina Hastings, on Rosamond Lehmann and also one on W. Somerset Maugham.

Both of the biographies are marvellous so I was delighted to find her latest work Sybille Bedford An Appetite for Life by Selina Hastings available via Libby,

She had the bitter sadness of losing her much loved father when she was fourteen, and the misfortune to have to manage living with her mother Lisa,needy, selfish, anti-maternal, irresponsible, and later to be her carer before the drug-addicted Lisa was sent back to Hitler’s Germany for enforced detox treatment under the care of her own elderly mother, where she soon died. These difficult life circumstances deserve commiseration and sympathy.

 But throughout the rest of the biography Sybille turned into an amiable freeloading sociable partygoer, a growing authority on wine and an excellent cook and gourmand, who talked about writing a novel for twenty years before actually getting down to writing it.

As Sybille was so very, very fortunate in the friends who supported her throughout her life we have to assume that she was charming, delightful, fun and nice to have around. I can’t think that merely being an orphaned deserving cause would have been enough to warrant the colossal generosity and freely given accommodation, cheques and trips to and from the USA that so many of her friends bestowed upon She went through lovers like other women might go through hats or a pair of shoes, mostly women but a few men thrown in the mix.  

Hastings details the reasons for Sybille's hatred of her native Germany and her love for France.  Sybille in an arranged marriage, the himosexual groom was paid, was able to get a visa to England just before the Germans occupied Paris.  The account of her trip to Mexico was very interesting.  

Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist, biographer of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Rosamund Lehmann, Sybille Bedford and, in The Red Earl, of her father.

She is the winner of the Marsh Biography Prize, the Spear's Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Award.