Ashantee

by Peter Altenberg, Katharina Von Hammerstein (Translator)

This collection of thirty-eight impressionist episodes describes a white man's friendship with a group of Ashanti tribes people from the Gold Coast of Africa (the former British colony known today as Ghana), who in 1896 were put on display as living objects in a popular ethnographic exhibit in the Vienna Zoological Garden, then still located in Vienna's famous amusement park called Prater. The exhibit caused a veritable "Ashanti fever" as the show attracted five to six thousand visitors per day. Altenberg, barely disguised as Ashantee's autobiographical character Sir Peter, shows a genuine curiosity about the cultural Other and paints a critical picture of his Austrian contemporaries' prejudices, revealed as they were experienced by the Africans.In "Ashantee", beautiful, sensual, childlike, and wholesome African 'paradise people' provide inspiration for the tormented civilised soul of the fin-de-siecle European. Eccentric coffeehouse writer Altenberg is famous for his unique telegram style. Critic Karl Kraus claimed, 'One sentence by Peter Altenberg is equal to an entire Viennese novel'. "Ashantee" introduces the reader to a little-known facet of vibrant Vienna around 1900. Combining cross-cultural sympathy with colonial stereotyping, the book has gained new popularity as current debates about the challenges of cultural coexistence in the global society have renewed interest in the literature about encounters between people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In this edition, Peter Altenberg's literary text is illustrated with reprints of original drawings and photographs of Altenberg and the Ashanti in Vienna.

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Stella Butler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this morning Like props for being the LIKE ONE OF THE ONLY ONES to think that maybe having PEOPLE in the zoo in vienna is lowk wrong but the bar is actually in hell like in the bottom most circle of hell

[Daniel Schechtel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man muss das Herz jedes Menschen öffnen
mit dem Schlüssel, welcher dazu passt

La primera novela que leo en alemán original (sin simplificaciones). Me gustó la fragmentación, me gustaron algunas escenas, me encantó el impresionismo, lo cual un poco le quitó coherencia. Al haber sido escenas dispersas juntadas en un libro, no me parece que hubo un gran trabajo de edición, y las marcas que colocan al libro entre ficción y realidad le quitan magia, a mi gusto.
Tuve que discutir preparar una clase con el libro y discutirlo en clase, y se podrían decir muchas por ende muchas más cosas.
Don't have the time, though.