Diabelli

by Hermann Burger

Together with other disillusioned illusionists, the titular magician exposes the dark underside of art, intent on unveiling life’s elegant deception

In following the tales of these magicians of madness, Diabelli offers unique confessional accounts of linguistic self-destruction. Chief among them is prestidigitator Grazio Diabelli, who refuses an invitation to perform and instead discourses on the history of escapology as he contemplates his own final and permanent disappearing act.

Also waiting in the wings is August Stramm, 'pianistic abortion' applying for the post of orchestra minion despite being hard of hearing; and Anatol Zentgraf, private scholar and maniacal reader who is the alleged epicenter of an earthquake.

Added to this first English edition is Burger’s tale 'The Laughter Artist', an account of a nameless professional artist of cachinnation whose mother’s backstage visit induces a fatal culmination of his art.

Genres: Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

Published March 25, 2025

About the author

Hermann Burger was born in 1942 in Burg, Canton of Aargau; his father worked for an insurance company. He enrolled at the ETH Zurich in 1962 and began studying architecture, but switched to German literature and art history in 1964. The publication of the poetry collection "Rauchsignale" ("Smoke Signals") in 1967 marked the beginning of his literary career, followed by the prose collection Bork in 1970. For the next couple of years Burger focused on his career in literary studies, writing his thesis on Paul Celan and his habilitation treatise on contemporary Swiss literature. He taught at universities in Zurich, Bern and Fribourg and worked as a literary editor for the Aargauer Tagblatt. His academic experience is reflected in the loosely autobiographical novel "Die künstliche Mutter" ("The Artificial Mother") which won him the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis in 1980. It was dedicated to his wife and its first edition has the dedication „Für Anne Marie“.
Burger's first major novel "Schilten. Schulbericht zuhanden der Inspektorenkonferenz" ("Schilten. School Report for the Attention of the Inspectors' Conference") was published in 1976 and made into a movie by Swiss film director Beat Kuert in 1979. It is about a teacher who has to tell the conference of inspectors about the development of his pupils, but speaks about death cult, graveyards and burials in a very detailed way. Archetypes of this novels are Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard. Burger mixes reality and fiction, and the more one reads about him, the more one finds out, that Burger writes about himself, his own suffering.
He won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1985 for his story "Die Wasserfallfinsternis von Badgastein" ("The Waterfall-Eclipse of Badgastein"). 1988, a changing of publishers from S. Fischer to Suhrkamp took place in a spectacular way.
The novel "Brenner" (in two volumes, four were planned), shows a protagonist wrapped in cigar smoke, who tells his life - Burger himself was a cigar smoker and descendant of cigar producers. Volume 1 has exactly 25 capitles, like a cigar box contains 25 cigars. Each capitle's name contains the name of a famous cigar brand. The second capitle announces the author's suicide intention: A red Ferrari is bought, because saving money no longer makes sense. It is about the divorce and the grief about having no contact to his two kids. Burger's last lessor was emeritus historian Jean Rudolf von Salis (= „Jérôme von Castelmur-Bondo“ in the novel). The last months of Burger's life and a review on his 46 years are described detailed in this roman a clef, he describes all coining persons (under changed names).
Burger's depressive and desperate moods grew with his literary acclaim, leading him to write the "Tractatus logico-suicidalis" (1988), a collection of aphorisms advocating suicide. The 1046 aphorisms are about the sentence „Gegeben ist der Tod, bitte finden Sie die Lebensursache heraus.“ (Death is given, please finde the cause of life.) The title remembers Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The book about suicide was viewed by the critics with sarcasm, and the seriousity of his suicide plans were not recognized. On February 28, 1989 he committed suicide in Brunegg by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Not until Burger's death the critics saw similarities to Jean Améry and his book Hand an sich legen (that Burger knew).
Burger's early promoter Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literature critic, wrote March 3, 1989, few days after his death, in an obituary: „Hermann Burger war ein Artist, der immer aufs Ganze ging, der sich nicht geschont hat. Er war ein Mensch mit einer großen Sehnsucht nach dem Glück. Die deutsche Literatur hat einen ihrer originellsten Sprachkünstler verloren.“ („Hermann Burger was an artist who went the whole hog every time, didn't conserve himself. He was a man with a big longing for happiness. The German literature has lost one of her most inventive language artists.")
H

Reviews

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, weird, Freudian (though truthful post-Freudian is probably more accurate); you could scarcely have more fun dealing with high-anxiety characters than by reading these short stories (monologues? I’m compelled to call Diabelli a novella).

[Kaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, verbose, spiraling. The four monologues sprint a tightrope between erudition and megalomania. Like if Eric Feurer characters had a PhD.

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of four bizarre, unconventional narratives, first published in German in 1979 but with one additional entry included here in its first English edition, would likely appeal to fans of Thomas Bernhard, as the tales are structured more like long monologues or rants, though they do each tell a story in their own fashion. Stylistically the two authors are very similar as well, with repetitive phrasing that results in an almost hypnotic effect that could instead be sleep-inducing if you’re tired or maddening if you’re irritable, and I definitely have to be in the proper mood for it. But at least Burger uses paragraphs, even if they are long.

I found the majority of the book closer to 3 star territory as far as my tastes go, but the title story, about a stage magician who’s final performance may be his own disappearance from the public eye forever, bumps it up to a 4. It’s brilliantly told, and I found it fascinating to learn about the real life history of magic and related trickery and deception, especially the humanoid chess-playing “automaton” from the 1700s that could beat even the best chess players, and which apparently Edgar Allan Poe discovered the secret to several decades later.

Recommended if you have a hankering for eccentric, neurotic narrators who like to obsess and pontificate long-windedly over exceedingly obscure subjects, perhaps as a way of dealing with their own neuroses, as the translator Adrian Nathan West suggests in his introduction.