Stefan Zweig - two short stories - "The Invisible Collection" (1925) and "Forgotten Dreams" (1927)

I am very grateful to Pushkin Press for publishing The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, translated by award winning Anthea Bell.   That being said there are some serious things wrong with this book.  First of all "collected" does not always mean complete, so what is this book, is it all Zweig's stories or just some of them?  Reading all of a writers short stories is important to many people, including me.  I prefer to read them in publication order but I am not rigid on this.

Secondly why is Pushkin Press so cheap or lazy as not to include at least a brief introduction? Thirdly, I really think short story anthologies should include first publication date and place of first publication information.  I know Anthea Bell has easy access to this information but it is not to be found in this collection.      

There are 22 stories in the collection.  I have already posted on his "Mendel the Bibliophile".  I loved this story beyond all objectivity.  Yesterday and this morning I read two more of his stories, one was kind of disappointing cliched romantic story and the other was a great story about the devastating impact of hyper-inflation on Germany in 1925.   

"Forgotten Dreams" is pretty much standard man runs into woman he loved years ago who would not marry him but who now is going to marry a wealthy count for a luxury life story.  The prose is high romantic bright fluorescent.  It disappointed me but if I am into a writer I take the good with the average. 

"The Invisible Collection" is a very interesting story.  The subtitle of the story is "An Episode of the German Inflation of 1925".   In 1925 German currency was in a terrible period of declining value.  Life savings that could have once easily supported people for decades were reduced to often less than one percent of former value.  When people got any money, they first bought food on the black market and with anything left they bought things that they thought would hold value.  However, even this did not store value as if you later sold the items the money you soon got for them soon lost much of its value.  As the story opens an art dealer talks about how many of their old customers had to sell their treasured just to survive.  He plans a visit to a very old long term customer of the firm, hoping maybe he will sell some of his treasures.   The man lives with his wife and middle aged daughter and is now blind.  He can no longer see his treasured collection of etchings and prints inluding a Rembrant etching.  I do not want to spoil the plot to much as it is so moving.  The wife and sister have been forced to sell all of his collection just to survive and have replaced them with blank paper.  The elderly man does not realize what has happened and still treasures his collection. To me this story brought home the reality of the German hyper inflation.  

I look forward to reading the rest of the stories.

I am really glad I decided to once again participate in 

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - an elegy to a lost culture. 1942

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. 2001. 

The Emperor's Tomb By Joseph Roth 1938 

"Flower Days" by Robert Walser 1907 (no post) 

"Trousers" by Robert Walser -1909 (no post)

Medea By Crista Wolf

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori 

"Forgotten Dreams" by StefanZweig (no post)  

Leviathan" by Joseph Roth

"The Legend of the Holy Drinker" by Joseph Roth

Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse 1932 - Orientalizing and Hesse

It has been a long time since I have read a novel by Hermann Hesse, at least forty years.  I can still recall the spiritual journey of Shidhartha.  I can bring up a lot of the ultimate counter culture novel, Stephenwolf and I would still enjoy playing The Glass Bead Game.  Based on my recollection, a lot more works by Hesse have been translated into English since I last read one of his novels.  This is a very good thing as his ideas are much more complicated and subtle than they appear at first.  

I wanted to read a novel,by Hesse as part of my participation in German Literature III.  I also wanted to read one that was not terribly long.  Journey to the East is only 128 pages in my edition and carries on his concerns with the decay of Western culture and his belief in what he sees as the wisdom of the East.  At some point, I don't doubt this has been pondered by academics, I need to step back and wonder how much of his opus is based on Orientalization, the ideas of Jung and Spengler, and whether or not I enjoy reading him for his intrinsic interest and how much of my pleasure in reading Journey to the East is nostalgia.  I will read more new to me Hesse and may reread my old Hesse.  

Journey to the East is not the master work my three classics are but it is for sure worth reading as a fourth Hesse.  Like his other works it focuses on "secret wisdom" obtainable though a profound study of the teachings of eastern masters.  1932, when it was first published in Germany, was a very difficult year for Germany and much of the world.  Huge numbers were out of work, many people were deeply dissatisfied with received forms of wisdom, cults were every where and the darkest one of all was soon to take over Germany. The underlying ideology of Nazism was also a form of a journey to a fantasy of the wisdom of the ancient east.  It also focused on guru like great leaders and extraordinary teachers of opaque and obscure wisdom, just like Journey to the East and other core Hesse texts do. Hesse kind of also, in my opinion, plays on the vanity of his readers who see themselves as penetrating beyond the thought patterns of ordinary people.  In all of his works I have read there is a contempt for the mundane world and a sense of elitism based on a grasp of secret teachings.  

Journey to the East is told from the point of view of a man who is a member of an ancient league seeking wisdom through a real and virtual journey to the east.  Among the members have been Rilke, Don Quixote, Plato, Pythagoras, Mozart, Tristram Shandy and Puss in Boots as well as the ferryman from Shidhartha.  When one joins the league, you are sworn to secrecy.  The central character of the novel is confused about the league, is it necessary to physically go east to find true wisdom or is the east all around us.  He decides to write an exposé on his experiences with the league.  There is also some interesting plot lines involving a missing lowly servant who turns out to be the president of the league.  There is a scene at a league meeting in which we first learn the servant is the league president when he appears in magnificent garb.  (I admit when I read the description of the garb and the meeting I did not think divine teachings I thought this just might be silly).

It is hard to pin down this work, and the rest of Hesse, as "meaning something". Just when you have a theory, Hesse undercuts you.  

What Hesse work should I next read?

I Was Jack Mortimer by Alexander Lernet-Holena 1933

I Was Jack Mortimer by Alexander Lernet-Holenia is an interesting set in Vienna novel in the noir mode.  I found the first third or 

so of the novel well done but after that I thought it went seriously down hill.   

The story is told in the first person by a cab driver.  One fine day he picks up a fare, an ordinary seeming m

man, well dressed is all he noticed.   When he arrives at the man's requested destination he discovers 

man is dead, having been shot several times.   At first he thinks he must of course report this to the

police.  Then he decides that if he goes to the police and tell them he did not notice a man being shot

several times in his cab they wil see him as a suspect.  He goes through the man's pockets and finds

out he is Jack Mortimer, an American.  In the next phase of the book the author takes us to the 

American west in cowboy country on the border with Mexico to learn about the real life of Jack

Mortimer.  Clearly the author knew nothing about American cowboys other than what he saw in 

movies of the 1930s.  The novel takes a turn for the stupid as it enters Mexico and Jack falls for

a beautiful señorita.  The longer the novel stays in America, the worse it gets as the author tries 

to set up a plausible reason why Jack Mortimer was murdered in Vienna.  Once we return to Vienna

it was interesting to see the narrator's angst as the police to begin to see him as a murder suspect.  

Overall I am glad I have read another book by an author from Vienna but I do not endorse

reading until you have read higher regarded Viennese writers like Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. 

I want to try to be fair to this book and I admire Pushkin Press for the many books they have 

published in translation so I am quoting their description of the book below.

"The cast of this brilliant thriller ... are pure Raymond Chandler ... but the Viennese setting gives it an extra, stylish twist. It's excellently written and fearsomely gripping." The Times A taxi-driver in 1930s Vienna impersonates a murder victim-with unsettling consequences "One doesn't step into anyone's life, not even a dead man's, without having to live it to the end." A man climbs into Ferdinand Sponer's cab, gives the name of a hotel, and before he reaches it has been murdered: shot through the throat. And though Sponer has so far committed no crime, he is drawn into the late Jack Mortimer's life, and might not be able to escape its tangles and intrigues before it is too late... Twice filmed, I Was Jack Mortimer is a tale of misappropriated identity as darkly captivating and twisting as the books of Patricia Highsmith.Alexander Lernet-Holenia was born in Vienna in 1897. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and became a protégé of Rainer Maria Rilke. During his life he wrote poetry, novels, plays and was a successful screenwriter. His uneasy relationship with the National Socialist Party resulted in his removal from prominence in 1944, but after the end of the Second World War, he again became a vital figure in Austrian cultural life. He died in 1976."

In reading the works of German and Austrian authors who were adults during the Nazi era I do

want to know how they dealt with the times.  I know this does not impact the artistic value of

their work but it interests me.  Here is Wikipedia's account of our authors activities.

Lernet-Holenia participated in the Invasion of Poland as a reactivated and drafted lieutenant of the reserve, an experience on which he based his 1941 novel Die Blaue Stunde (The Blue Hour) which after the war became known under the title Mars im Widder (Mars in Aries). It has been called "the only Austrian resistance novel" because the plot features an ideologically troubled central character, hints at the existence of active political opposition, and because the Nazi government banned and quarantined the first edition of the book.

Although Lernet-Holenia made himself a lucrative business as a popular screenplay writer during the Third Reich, he was one of the few accomplished Austrian authors who kept his distance from National Socialism, and refused to endorse the Nazi political system or to participate in its notorious blood and soil literary efforts. However, to stay in business he had to make arrangements with the regime, which included becoming chief dramaturgist at the "Heers-Filmstelle" (the audiovisual media center of the Wehrmacht in Berlin, charged with producing propaganda films for military cinemas) after the Polish campaign. Robert Dassanowsky has stated that "[Lernet-Holenia's] early actions in the Reich were confused, appearing to vacillate between naiveté and the often clumsy, often shrewd acts of a survivalist ... a unique but not incomprehensible position." Lernet-Holenia became more outspoken as the war progressed. After his removal from his public position in 1944 he escaped service on the Eastern combat theatre through contrived illness and the help of the resistance network.

 

Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth 1926

So far I have read and posted on two novels by the great Viennese writer, Joseph Roth, his acknowledged master piece The Radetsky March and a sequal to it, The Emperor's Tomb.  I have added Roth to my read all I can list (meaning translated and in a Kindle edition).  

 Hotel Savoy is set in the years right after WWI  in a large city which sounds like it might be Vienna, Roth's home, but we never learn the name of the city.  I guess it is any town of some size in eastern or Central Europe.  The narrator is returning home from a long walk from a Siberian POW camp.  He is classical educated but he cannot find a job.

The central place and really the center of the novel is the Hotel Savoy.  It is kind of a combination Grand Hotel for the rich of Europe on the first three floors and above that it houses very poor war veterans, displaced persons and the girls who dance naked in the hotel bar where the rich can patronize them and hire them for sex.  There are at least twenty five who stay at the hotel that Roth brilliantly particularizes. One of the things I learned from reading the novels of Roth and Stefan Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday was how pervasive prostitution was in between the wars Vienna. You have to see this as a reduction of elemental humanity to commerce and a sign of the degradation of women in the societies. It is saying if you are a poor but passably attractive woman you can either clean the toilets of the rich or be a prostitute.  Visits to prostitutes were also a mark of manhood and of course fun sometimes.  

Every body in the hotel is scrambling to make money through some kind of scam. Hyper-inflation is just starting and there is a lot of currency trading.  The hotel savoy is very international if not cosmopolitan. 

One exciting event happens in the hotel that all the residents were excited over.  The super rich Jewish American industrialist Broomfield comes  to the hotel to stay for a while. Every one wonders why.  Through a lucky break the narrator is hired by Broomfield to screen the people who want to see him and be sort of a personal assistant.  

You can see social unrest building in the city as more ex-soldiers pour into the city, many staying at the Hotel Savoy, more and more citizens are near destitution, and inflation continues.  This is a world where only how much money you have matters.  An apocalyptic event closes the novel.  

This is very much worth reading.  The next Roth work I read will probably be Job. 

I just wanted to put this picture on my blog.  

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - an elegy to a lost culture. 1942

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. 2001. 

The Emperor's Tomb By Joseph Roth 1938 

"Flower Days" by Robert Walser 1907 (no post) 

"Trousers" by Robert Walser -1909 (no post)

Medea By Crista Wolf

Passport by Herta Muller. Romania Nobel Prize winner, German language writer. 

Mrs. Roth 

 

, 

The Passport by Herta Müller (1986, 98 pages, translated from German 1989 by Martin Chalmers)

I decided to read The Passport (Masks) by Herta Müller as part of my participation in the German Literature III for several reasons.  I wanted to 

support the event goal of reading more books by German language women writers, I have never as far 

as I recall read any fiction by a Romanian author (she wrote in German and emigrated or if you prefer

escaped Romania for Berlin in 1987) and she won the Nobel Prize in 2009.  Of her several works 

available in translations The Passport is by far the shortest one at 98 pages so I picked selected it and

I am very glad I did.  I will hopefully one day read all her translated Kindle edition books.   

Annina from Casablanca was speaking about an earlier devil who had Romania by the throat but she could just as well have been talking about Ceausecu who by his very shadowy presence dominates The Passport.   

The Passport is built around the attempts of a miler in a small German speaking village in Romania to get his immigration passport to West Germany approved.  The book is not at all a straight forward narration.  It is a collage of brief episodes, some from the past and some from the present.  The residents of the village are caught between the modern west and old folk ways and terrors in Romania.  There is a lingering preoccupation with Jews and Gypsies.  Life is brutal in the village and there is very little hope.  All of the village is interested in the miller's attempt to obtain a passport.  There are amazing scenes in the story.  There is a "skinner" who captures owls and skins them for no apparent reason.  I found this a powerful and at times  disturbing book.  

Herta Müller, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, was born in 1953 in itzkydorf, a German-speaking village in Romania. After college she worked as a translator in a factory, and was dismissed for refusing to work for the Romanian secret service, Securitate. As a result, her first book, Niederungen, was unpublished for many years and appeared in 1982 in censored form. In 1984, the original version appeared in Germany, after which Herta Müller could no longer publish in Romania. Securitate subjected her again and again to threats, interrogation, and searches of her home. In 1987 she moved to West Germany. She has been a visiting professor at universities in England, the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. She lives in Berlin.

 

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori 1958

This wonderful book—literally, a book full of wonders—which lived for too long in shadow, has been brought fully to light by Philip Boehm’s lustrous new translation. An Ermine in Czernopol may at last take its place on the shelf alongside The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
—John Banville

If my shelves were short, I would remove both of the books Banville mentions and replace them with An Ermine in Czernopol and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.  

Memoirs of An Anti-Semite is one of the towering master works of 20th century European literature.  I am so grateful to Caroline and Lizzy for hosting  the German Literature III event so I did not die never having read the works of Gregor Von Rezzori.  He was a very productive writer in a wide variety of genres including travel books,  movie scripts, children's books, popular literature and towering works of art.   

An Ermine in Czernopol is set in Czernowitz, once in The Austro-Hungarian Empire, now part of the Ukraine.  It was once a place great cultural diversity, with a dozen languages, several major religions co-existing.  I cannot describe it as well as the NYRB:

"Czernopol is a border city, a cultural and linguistic melting pot “where you can find a dozen of the most disparate nationalities and at least half a dozen bitterly feuding faiths—all living in the cynical harmony that is built on mutual aversion and common business dealings.” It’s suspended in history between a feudal past, whose peasants still bring their pungent presence and goods to the city’s market square, and a globalizing modernity whose vanguard has arrived in Czernopol in the form of American jazz, which jostles with the old Viennese waltzes and gypsy music. The city is further divided between the imperial Habsburg past and the chauvinistic nationalism of the new Romanian regime: “Even in its deteriorated state this former grandeur was easy to see and hard to forget, not yet fully surrendered to the garish colors of the new rulers.” In the lull between the world wars there are signs of the catastrophe to come: Nazi demonstrations, swastikas painted on Jewish shops, and, in the climactic set-piece scene, a pogrom sparked off by ethnic tensions over soccer team allegiances."

I know I have not told the plot and I don't plan to.  All I will say is read his books.  The NYRB has three i titles available.  I have not yet read his memoirs The Snows of Yesterday but I will correct that error soon.  

I am really glad I decided to once again participate in 

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - an elegy to a lost culture. 1942

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. 2001. 

The Emperor's Tomb By Joseph Roth 1938 

"Flower Days" by Robert Walser 1907 (no post) 

"Trousers" by Robert Walser -1909 (no post)

Medea By Crista Wolf

An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor Von Rezzori 

"Forgotten Dreams" by StefanZweig (no post)  

Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one “spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest.’’ After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II , he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for both radio and film and began publishing books at a rapid rate, including the four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society. From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence with his wife, gallery owner Beatrice Monte della Corte. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (both published by NYRB Classics).  From New York Review of Books.

From one of the movies he acted in.

Mel u

Medea by Christa Wolf 1998

I

A citizen of East Germany and a committed socialist, Mrs. Wolf managed to keep a critical distance from the communist regime. Her best-known novels included “Der geteilte Himmel” (“Divided Heaven,” 1963), addressing the divisions of Germany, and “Kassandra” (“Cassandra,” 1983), which depicted the Trojan War.

She won awards in East Germany and West Germany for her work, including the Thomas Mann Prize in 2010. The jury praised her life’s work for “critically questioning the hopes and errors of her time, and portraying them with deep moral seriousness and narrative power.”

Christa Ihlenfeld was born March 18, 1929, in Landsberg an der Warthe, a part of Germany that is now in Poland. She moved to East Germany in 1945 and joined the Socialist Unity Party in 1949. She studied German literature in Jena and Leipzig and became a publisher and editor.

In 1951, she married Gerhard Wolf, an essayist. They had two children. She died in 2011- from Goodreads 

I wish to thank Kathleen Jones, author of by far the best biography of Katherine Mansfield, The Story Teller, for suggesting I read Christa Wolf as part of my participation in German Literature Month III.  I checked on Amazon and Wolf seems to have only two books translated into English available as Kindle editions.  I am interested in the retelling of old myths, long ago I read Euripides' Medea, and I have seen more than one movie version of the legend so Wolf's Medea seemed like a clear choice.  In the addition I read Margaret Atwood has a very interesting introduction where she details the numerous operas and literary works based on the Medea.  

I hope you know the basic legend of Medea allegedly killing her children and the quest of Jason.  Wolf brilliant redoes the story, told through multiple points of view ranging from Medea and Jason to royal astrologers, in a way that turns it into a commentary on the nature of power and corruption that is universal.  She takes us deeply into the mind of Jason and Medea.  She humanizes Medea without hiding her darkness.  Medea is set in Greece circa 450 B. C. People beliefs and actions may seem controlled by superstition and appear barbarously violent to us but all you have to do, as you are pretty much forced to in the cultural context from which Medea comes to the rule of the Nazis in Europe to fund a time that made the world of Medea and Jason seem tame and quite rational.  

I greatly enjoyed this book.  It is very relevant, much as Margaret Atwood's Penelope  is, to a feminist rereading of Greek myths.  I plan to reread Medea by Euripides quite soon.  I have a public domain Oxford Press translation.  I hope one day to read Cassandra, Wolf's retelling of another Greek legend set in the Trojan war.

I am really glad I decided to once again participate in 

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - an elegy to a lost culture. 1942

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. 2001. 

The Emperor's Tomb By Joseph Roth 1938 

"Flower Days" by Robert Walser 1907 (no post) 

"Trousers" by Robert Walser -1909 (no post)

Mel u

The Emperor's Tomb by John Roth (1938, 160 pages) His Last Novel

I

I am really glad I decided to once again participate in 

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - an elegy to a lost culture. 1942

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald. 2001. 

The Emperor's Tomb by Joseph Roth is a sequal to his  The Radetsky March (1932) and should be read only by those who have previously read and enjoyed the first book. I enjoyed them both but I did find The Radetsky March the much better of the two.  The second book is only 160 pages and I do endorse reading both of them in close sequence.  

A. S. Byatt in a very good short article in The Guardian says that this novel is about mothers, wives, and women where the first one was about fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and brothers in arms in the Royal Austrian army and a country dominated by the Emperor Franz Joseph. It is very much about prostitutes and how omni-prescent they were in old Vienna.  There was also a constant fear of disease.  It was a very "macho culture" where dueling scars were a mark of manhood and a distaste for brothels or a concern over illnesses made one suspect in the eyes of your all important fellow officers.   The Emperor's Tomb follows the life of a grand-nephew of a founder of the Nobel Trotta line.

In this novel the central character goes from being a young dandy in Vienna ( a great place to be a well healed young man about town) to being inducted into the military and winding up in Siberia.  In a scene you knew it broke Roth's heart to write, he talks about the day Austria voted to be unified with Germany and the growing proliferation of Nazis Swastikas in his beloved home town.

Ok, not the master work that The Radetsky March is but still it has great scenes, and weak ones, but I am still very glad I read it.  I will next read by Roth The Savoy Hotel, kind of a Grand Hotel type of work.