German Short Stories 2

by David Constantine (Editor), Ingeborg Bachmann (Co-author), Francis Kyle (Translator)

The eight stories in this volume offer a varied and representative collection of twentieth century German authors from a range of political and cultural backgrounds. Styles include the non-fictional manner of Kluge's montage technique and the contrasting classical storytelling of Penzoldt. With reading notes and parallel texts in German and English, this anthology is valuable to the German student of English as well as the English student of German. Reflecting trends in German literature, the stories have been selected for their quality as well as their readability, and will enhance the appreciation of both languages.

Genres: German Literature, Short Stories, Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 1976

About the author

Born in 1944, David Constantine worked for thirty years as a university teacher of German language and literature. He has published several volumes of poetry, most recently, Nine Fathom Deep (2009). He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet. In 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's Lighter Than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Goethe's Faust, Part I was published by Penguin in 2005; Part II in April 2009. He is also author of one novel, Davies, and Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton. His four short story collections are Back at the Spike, the highly acclaimed Under the Dam (Comma, 2005), and The Shieling (Comma, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Constantine's story 'Tea at the Midland' won the BBC National Short Story Award 2010, and won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2013 for the collection (Comma Press, 2012). He lives in Oxford where, for ten years, he edited Modern Poetry in Translation with his wife Helen (until 2011). David's short story 'In Another Country' has been adapted into 45 Years - a major Film4-funded feature film, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay & Charlotte Rampling. This film won two silver bear awards at the Berlinale International Film festival in February 2015. David is also the author of the forthcoming novel, released by Comma Press, The Life-Writer.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book with German stories in English and German. Each page is translated on the facing page, making it possible to check one's German-reading in English without losing one's place in the original text. I took the approach, however, of reading the entire story in German once before reading any English, which kept me "honest" in terms of how well I understood the writing.

The writing varies in complexity, but none of it would be appropriate for a beginner to reading German. The easiest stories to read were probably "Der Delphin" by Ernst Penzoldt, and "Jennifers Traueme" by Marie Luise Kaschnitz. The first is a somewhat mythical tale, set on a Mediterranean island, about a boy's relationship with a dolphin, and the second is a sort of ghost story, about a little girl who has dreams seemingly caused by ESP or some sort of supernatural phenomenon.

At the moderately difficult level are "Fedezeen" by Guenter de Bruyn, "Das Gebell" by Ingeborg Bachmann, and "Anita G." by Alexander Kluge. "Fedezeen" is a kind of reflection on growing up during the Third Reich, in the form of an escapist fantasy indulged by a small boy and his grandfather. It seems to suggest that the only escape from the National Socialist state was into a world of magic and the denial of reality. "Das Gebell" is the story of a young newlywed's relationship with her mother in law, which grows closer and more caring as her relationship with her husband fails. It can be seen both as a feminist comment about marriage and a critique of the treatment of aging parents in Western society. "Anita G." is a more experimental story about a young transient woman's wanderings around Germany and run-ins with police and men who wish to "save" her. This story seems to be a metaphor for the rootlessness Germans felt after losing the war and learning of the Holocaust.

The stories I found most difficult in German were "Der Verzicht," by Siegfried Lenz, "Lobeller Waeldchen," by Johannes Bobrowski, and "Der Zimmerer" by Thomas Bernhardt. "Der Verzicht" is a rather detatched narrative of the return on foot of a soldier to his hometown in the midst of the War, and the disruption that he brings to this peacable community. "Lobeller Waeldchen" is largely written in dialect, and simply describes a night of drinking and aimlessness in a village pub. "Der Zimmerer" is written in two very long paragraphs, in a stream-of-consciousness style, and concerns a lawyer's confrontation with a vicious criminal he has helped to release from prison.

The stories are interesting in various ways, although the more experimental approaches can be hard to maintain an interest in, especially for those with less than perfect German reading skills. They seem to have been selected for their importance to developments in German (and Austrian) literature, so the book is of interest to anyone wanting to expand their knowledge of modern German writing. It is not the most enjoyable book I have read, but I did get something worthwhile out of the process.

[^ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parallel text is a really clever idea. Though this is absolutely not a book for beginners, it is one that ambitious and hard-working beginners should aspire to. I’ve found it very helpful in pinpointing my ignorance; whether that be tenses of verb or, vocabulary. I also use it to pick out and learn idioms and phrases. Obviously, in reverse, this book can be equally as useful to native German speakers who are learning English. When I’m feeling lazy I just read, and enjoy, the eight stories in English.

Overall, hand on heart, I cannot realistically say that I’ve both read and understood the entire contents of this book in German …. Well, not yet, though I’m working on it!

[LiB · Rating 3 out of 5]

The way this series of anthologies work is to present a selection of German language short stories representative of a particular period alongside a faithful, but not literal, translation, arranged in order of difficulty. They are not intended for beginner language learners, but rather students of German literature. The easiest texts require quite advanced skills and by the end of the book I feel that even the average German reader might struggle. I’m reading a German book about underground political humour in the Third Reich at the moment, and I‘m finding it a piece of cake compared to all but the first piece.

This particular volume is the second of the series, and collects stories written in the few decades after WW2. It‘s interesting that the first collection, stories from immediately after the war, were mostly about the aftermath of the war, the disintegrated society, the refugees and rubble, but with traces of optimism for the rebuilding. It took some time for people to be able to write, even indirectly, about the Nazi regime. All of these stories in this subsequent volume do address it, either head-on or implicitly, and it’s about as cheerful as you might expect from an anthology of that nature.

The subjects range from a Jewish man being rounded up for mass execution by his former schoolmates(Der Verzicht), to a boy whose grandfather dies helping him try to avoid joining the Hitler Youth (Fedezeen), to a young woman traumatised by her family’s time in the camps (Anita G.), plus a few allusive tales of secret cruelty and unacknowledged viciousness. This is a harrowing, difficult read, and would be even if you skip straight to the translations. It’s hard to judge the literary value, given all this, and I was unsure about how you could give such a collection a star rating. Still, from a literary point of view I really appreciated only a couple of the stories, Fedezeen and Lobellerwäldchen.

[Sheri Fresonke Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently visited Germany so on the trip, I wanted to get into the spirit and thought of local literature. These eight short stories offer some insight into the struggles of the community post World War II. I want to read the other eight in the first edition because they offered a good read.