FOREIGN RIGHTS AUTUMN 2013 - Hanser Literaturverlage

B I O G R A P H Y
RÜDIGER SAFRANSKI
A master biographer at his creative best,
Rüdiger Safranski offers the reader an inspirational
work on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
that presents him in an entirely new light.
© Peter-Andreas Hassiepen
No. 1 of the Non-Fiction Bestseller List two weeks after publication!
»Safranski is without doubt one of the leading proponents and most reliable, gifted
custodians of German philosophy and culture.« Die Literarische Welt on Romanticism
»Safranski shows that biographies can provide an introduction to the domains of philosophy and
culture at the highest level. His achievement in this context is simply astonishing.«
Neue Zürcher Zeitung on Schiller or The Invention of German Idealism
He was a young man from a good family, an eager student and an ardent romancer.
A best-selling author who attained a high-ranking and lucrative position in a small duchy,
Goethe dabbled in nature studies, fled to Italy and lived in sin. But for all that he found
time to compose the most memorable of love poems, engage in lofty competition with
friend and fellow dramatist Schiller, and write a canon of later work that flouted all the
conventions. But Goethe wanted more. He wanted his life to be an art-form in itself.
Rüdiger Safranski vividly describes the man behind the myth. Fifty years after Richard
Friedenthal’s definitive biography, a thick layer of interpretation has settled over Goethe’s
creations. Safranski casts new light on the ultimate polymath’s life and work by reappraising
primary sources – Goethe’s works, letters, diaries, recorded discourse, and the
accounts of his contemporaries. The result is a three-dimensional, living and breathing
portrait; a masterfully written book that allows us to see ourselves as contemporaries of
a man whose lifespan encompasses the playful Rococo era as well as the Classical and
Romantic periods, all the way through to the dour sobriety that marked the start of the
steam age. A man whose name came to define his time: the age of Goethe.
Rüdiger Safranski
Goethe –
Kunstwerk des Lebens
Goethe – Life as Art
A biography
800 pages with index.
Hardcover
Publication date:
August 2013
Rüdiger Safranski
was born in 1945. He is
a philosopher and a multiple
award-winning author whose
work has been translated
into over 20 languages.
Safranski has written
landmark biographies of
Schiller, E.T.A. Hoffmann,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
and Heidegger among
others, as well as treatises
on basic human nature,
good and evil, truth, and
most recently, muchacclaimed
works on
Romanticism (2007) and the
friendship between Goethe
and Schiller (2009).
»This book deserves acclaim if only for its elegant poise between vivid anecdote and intellectual
biography. The great strength of Safranski’s trenchant evaluation lies in the sureness of touch with
which he retraces the lofty heights of adventurous thinking this unparalleled poet explored.
Die Welt on Schiller or The Invention of German Idealism
Sales to Foreign Countries
NL (Atlas)
Romantik: BR (Liberdade), CHN (Horizon Media), H (Europa), IL (Carmel), I (Longanesi), J (Hosei UP),
ROK (Hankuk UP), NL (Atlas), SRB (IP Adresa), E (Tusquets), TR (Kabalci), USA (Northwestern UP)
Schiller. Die Erfindung des Deutschen Idealismus: CHN (People‘s Literature), H (Europa), I (Longanesi),
J (Hosei University Press), NL (Atlas), RUS (Text), SRB (Nolit), E (Tusquets)
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