issue 34 - New Books in German

AUTUMN 2013 n ISSUE 34
NEW BOOK
BOOKS IN
KS IN GERM
N GERMAN N
A SELECTION FROM AUSTRIA,
GERMANY AND SWITZERLAND
Novels n Crime Fiction n Debuts
Children’s and Young Adults’
Short Stories n Poetry n Social Theory
Biography n Philosophy n Book News
WWW.NEW-BOOKS-IN-GERMAN.COM

FICTION
2 Mirko Bonné: Nie mehr Nacht
3 Helene Hegemann: Jage zwei Tiger
4 Friedrich Christian Delius: Die linke Hand des Papstes
5 Ralph Dutli: Soutines letzte Fahrt
DEBUTS
8 Michael Fehr: Kurz vor der Erlösung
9 Sarah Stricker: Fünf Kopeken
10 Henriette Vásárhelyi: immeer
11 Stefanie de Velasco: Tigermilch
12 Katharina Hartwell: Das Fremde Meer
FICTION
14 Matthias Politycki: Samarkand Samarkand
15 Markus Ramseier: Vogelheu
16 Uwe Timm: Vogelweide
17 Anna Weidenholzer: Der Winter tut den Fischen gut
SHORT STORIES
22 Christoph W. Bauer: In einer Bar unter dem Meer
23 Ann Cotten: Der schaudernde Fächer
CRIME FICTION
24 Andrea Gerster: Ganz oben
25 Judith W. Taschler: Die Deutschlehrerin
CHILDREN and YOUNG ADULTS
28 Tamara Bach: Marienbilder
29 Finn-Ole Heinrich: Die erstaunlichen Abenteuer der Maulina
Schmitt – Mein kaputtes Königreich
30 Charlotte Inden: Anna und Anna
31 Johanna Rosen: Liberty Bell. Das Mädchen aus den Wäldern
NON-FICTION
33 Martin Mittelmeier: Adorno in Neapel
34 Hans-Peter Riegel: Beuys. Die Biographie
35 Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair: Amon. Mein Großvater
hätte mich erschossen
36 Peter Bieri: Eine Art zu leben – Über die Vielfalt
menschlicher Würde
37 Katharina Diel-Gligor, Wolfgang Gründinger,
Ali Aslan Gümüsay: 7 Tugenden Reloaded. Zukunftsmodelle
des Think Tank 30. Deutsche Gesellschaft des Club of Rome
A FORGOTTEN GEM
38 Alfred Döblin: Die Ermordung einer Butterblume
POETRY
39 José F. A. Oliver, translated by Romy Fursland
ARTICLES and INTERVIEWS
6 The Rise of Literary Agents in the German Book
Market, by Holger Heimann
7 The Amazon’s Writer-in-Residence: Ingo Schulze,
by Raphaela Sabel
13 Publisher Focus: Readux
Translator Focus: Jamie Bulloch
19 Juli Zeh, by Sally-Ann Spencer
26-27 Writer-in-Residence Programmes in the UK, with
an extract from Der nächtliche Lehrer by Klaus Böldl,
translated by Jean Darvill
32 Angela Krauß, by Julie Klassen
NEWS AND INFORMATION
7 Highlights of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2013
18 New German-Language Literature Prize in America,
by Grace Moss
20-21 NBG Choices – New and Forthcoming Publications
in English Translation
40 Applying for Translation Grants
German Book Prize 2013

Dear Reader,
It is a real pleasure and privilege to introduce this bold new issue of New Books in German. So popular were our last three
issues themed around the literary scenes of Berlin, Zurich and Vienna that we decided to keep up the momentum by curating
this issue with the theme ‘Creative Minds,’ in its many interpretations and guises.
From the off we see creative minds at work in the incredible selection of highly original titles chosen by our committees. In Martin
Mittelmeier’s acclaimed biography of Theodor Adorno, we see how the theory of the Frankfurt School may have been inspired by
the Italian tourist trail; the protagonist of Friedrich Christian Delius’ novella Die Linke Hand des Papstes translates the Pope’s
gestures into an entire history of modern civilisation; and Michael Fehr fittingly describes his extraordinary experimental debut
Kurz vor der Erlösung as ‘Seventeen Sentences’.
Our Writer-in-Residence feature will help you get acquainted with which influential Austrian, German and Swiss writers
will soon be gracing our shores, and our profiles of writers Angela Krauß and Juli Zeh should leave you with a sense of their
pioneering subject-matter and form respectively.
But writers aren’t the only ones with creative prowess, as our feature on The Rise of Literary Agents in the German Book
Market proves. The wealth of events happening at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, and highlighted in this issue, will also help
stir up exciting new innovative practice, as well as dynamic intercultural dialogue with guest nation Brazil.
You may uncover a further theme for this issue in the form of grandparent-grandchild relationships, perhaps a new take on
Elternliteratur, in both their nurturing and their destructive forms. Anna und Anna by Charlotte Inden is a witty and touching
exchange of letters between a grandmother and her granddaughter; Flo in Markus Ramseier’s Vogelheu will do anything for
her grandfather; and young readers will love Paulina’s strange but comforting granddad in Finn-Ole Heinrich’s new book.
Then there is Jennifer Teege’s captivating autobiography on how she came to terms with discovering that her grandfather
was arch-Nazi Amon Göth.
Perhaps the greatest thing about putting together New Books in German is getting to
work alongside people with a shared, tireless passion for German-language literature and
literary translation. No stranger to our NBG Choices of translated titles is Anthea Bell,
who has retired from our Steering Committee after many years of participation. On behalf
of everyone involved with the project, I would like to warmly thank Anthea for her insight,
expertise and her continuing unsurpassed dedication to translation. For this issue, thanks
must go to Grace Moss at the German Book Office in New York and our outstanding
editorial assistants Romy Fursland, Kerstin Germer, Andrew Hayden and Jenny
Watson. Our editorial consultant Sheridan Marshall has surpassed herself with endless
superb advice and her indefatigable talent for writing.
We hope you discover something within these pages that intrigues you, and we can’t wait
to hear what you think…
© James Robjant
Information for Editors
n The selection process for books that we review in NBG
is entirely independent.
n For each issue, we start with approximately 150 titles.
At our first editorial meeting we select around seventy
of these to send to our experienced team of reviewers.
n Our reviewers are translators, academics, editors and
agents – all extremely well-read and with a good feel
for the market.
n At our second editorial meeting, our committee discusses
the reviews and selects approximately thirty titles for the issue.
n Our Editorial Committee comprises some regular
members – translator Shaun Whiteside, agent Tanja
Howarth, bookseller Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles – as well
as representatives from the Austrian, German and Swiss
cultural institutes in London.
n Different guest members are invited to join the
committee each time, and include publishers, literary agents,
booksellers and translators.
n We have juries in both London and the United States.
The American jury consists of literary scouts, critics
and editors, as well as members of the German Book
Office and Goethe-Institut in New York.
n Our only guiding principle when selecting the books is
quality: we are looking for outstanding works and voices,
works which should have a chance even in the tricky
British and American market and internationally.
n All fiction books featured in New Books in German and
bought by an English-language publisher are guaranteed
a grant. Non-fiction books by German and Swiss authors are
guaranteed a grant (see page 40).
1

Mirko Bonné
Nie mehr Nacht
(Night No More)
Schöffling & Co., August 2013, 360pp. ISBN: 978-3-89561-406-4
Longlisted for the
German Book Prize 2013
Uncomfortable truths
Mirko Bonné’s latest novel takes the reader on a journey
through European history which is by turns moving,
disturbing and delightfully amusing.
Narrator Markus Lee is an artist who is commissioned by
an art magazine to sketch the bridges that played a crucial
role during the D-Day landings. Markus drives to France
with his fifteen-year-old nephew Jesse, who plans to stay
with his best friend’s family while they are looking after
an abandoned hotel on the coast. But it soon becomes
apparent that this is no simple road trip. The journey is
overshadowed by the loss of Jesse’s mother Ira – both her
son and her brother are still reeling from her recent suicide.
The drive to Normandy is full of tension as Markus and
Jesse make awkward efforts to connect with one another
while avoiding the one topic they really need to confront.
Bonné’s expert handling of the relationship between the
adult narrator and his teenage nephew produces many
wryly humorous moments. In the dream-like atmosphere
of the Hotel L’Angleterre, what was supposed to be a
week-long stay ends up lasting for a month. The experience
marks a turning point in Markus’ life and comes to have
lasting significance for the other characters.
Night No More offers an unsparing and engrossing account
of the liberation of France during which countless young
men who were scarcely older than Jesse lost their lives.
As the narrator tries to complete his sketches of the
D-Day bridges, he struggles to absorb the enormity of the
events of World War II and to render that history as an
artist. Meanwhile, Markus finds himself strongly attracted
to Jesse’s best friend’s mother, leading him to reflect on
his early sexual experiences and on his adolescence more
widely in what has become the fraught context of his family
history. The memory of his beloved but troubled sister
Ira looms large, generating unobtrusive reflection about
the ways in which individual lives and national histories
intersect with one another.
Bonné’s novel approaches an extraordinary chapter
of European history from a fresh and productive angle.
In a perfectly pitched narrative laced with skilfully observed
dialogue, Bonné brings to life an appealing cast of characters
whose personal stories suggest new ways of looking at the
D-Day landings.
A sample translation of this title
is available on the NBG website
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
© Sabine Bonné
Mirko Bonné
was born in 1965 in Tegernsee and lives
in Hamburg. He has translated poetry
by Keats, e.e.cummings and W. B. Yeats,
and has published several novels and
volumes of poetry. His novel Wie wir
verschwinden was longlisted for the
German Book Prize.
Previous works:
Traklpark (2012); Ausflug mit
dem Zerberus (2010); Wie wir
verschwinden (2009); Die Republik
der Silberfische (2008); Der eiskalte
Himmel (2006)
Translation rights available from:
Schöffling & Co.
Kaiserstraße 79
60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Contact: Kathrin Scheel
Tel: +49 69 91078716
Email: kathrin.scheel@schoeffling.de
www.schoeffling.de/foreignrights/new
Schöffling & Co.
has a simple credo: the focus is on the
authors. It has gained the reputation
of being a ‘publishing house that plays
a significant role in the shaping of
Germany’s literary future’ (SPIEGEL
online). Founded in November 1993,
Schöffling & Co. has since emerged
as one of Germany’s most innovative
independent literary publishing houses
with a tightly-woven international
network. An atmosphere of mutual
confidence and esteem and an
unceasing commitment to its authors
and their works provide the basis
for a fruitful literary relationship.
New German voices are recognised
and published alongside established
and famous names, while authors in
translation include Sadie Jones, Olga
Tokarczuk, Jennifer Egan, Peter Behrens,
Nir Baram and Miljenko Jergovic.
2 Fiction

Helene Hegemann
Jage zwei Tiger
(Hunting Two Tigers)
Hanser Berlin, August 2013, 288pp. ISBN: 978-3-446-24367-5
Car crash
Helene Hegemann’s hotly anticipated second novel is an
impressive follow-up to her sensational 2010 debut. The
shocking immediacy of the prose in Hunting Two Tigers
is perfectly matched to the tumultuous lives of its young
characters.
When a group of children throw a rock from a motorway
bridge it strikes a passing car. The car’s driver is killed and
her traumatised eleven-year-old son Kai, who had been a
passenger in the backseat, flees the crash scene to shelter
in a nearby forest. There he encounters a travelling circus
and falls in love with a teenage girl called Samantha. He
doesn’t know, and won’t find out, that she was part of the
group who threw the rock from the bridge. After Kai wakes
up in hospital hallucinating, with his estranged father at his
bedside, he has no option but to go and live with the man
who is now his only parent.
Alongside Kai and Samantha’s stories, we are introduced
to another troubled teenager: Celine is a spoilt child from
a wealthy background with a history of self-harm, drug
abuse and sexual transgression. Celine runs away from
home and tries out various alternative lifestyles before
her path crosses that of Kai’s bohemian father, with
whom she falls obsessively in love. Celine helps Kai to find
Samantha, who he has not been able to stop thinking about,
and their journey to find her unexpectedly brings Celine and
Kai even closer together.
The novel’s title, Hunting Two Tigers, is a condensed
reference to its epigraph, which epitomises the raw outlook
of the troubled protagonists: ‘The hunter who chases two
rabbits misses both. If you must fail, fail spectacularly, chase
two tigers.’ Hegemann’s young characters all crave – but
lack – a place they can call home, and are deeply damaged
souls. They inhabit a mixed-up and sometimes shocking
world in which it is all too easy to lose one’s bearings.
Hunting Two Tigers is packed with minutely observed
characters, sharply rendered dialogue and a host of
memorable individual episodes, vividly recounted in
Hegemann’s imaginative and distinctive language.
Its sudden, radical plot twists which take the story in
completely new directions and challenge the reader’s
expectations make this novel very difficult to put down.
‘A book that is startlingly intelligent,
pleasantly grotesque and deliciously
eloquent.’
– Die Welt on Axolotl Roadkill
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
© Alexandra Kinga Fekete
Helene Hegemann
was born in 1992 in Freiburg and lives
in Berlin. In 2008, she was hailed as
one of the year’s greatest discoveries
for her first film Torpedo, which won
her the Max Ophüls Prize. In 2010 she
made her debut as an author with the
novel Axolotl Roadkill, subsequently
translated into twenty languages. She
works as a director for theatre and
opera, and has a column in Interview
magazine.
Previous works:
Axolotl Roadkill (2010)
‘Helene Hegemann is the sensation
of this season... Axolotl Roadkill is
the big coming-of-age-novel for the
Generation Zero.’
– Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
on Axolotl Roadkill
Translation rights available from:
Carl Hanser Verlag
Kolbergerstr. 22, 81679 Munich,
Germany
Contact: Friederike Barakat
Tel: +49 89 998 30 509
Email: Barakat@hanser.de
www.hanser-literaturverlage.de
‘This book is driven by a constant
search, packed with spot-on
observation and surprising ideas.
Helene was offered the big stage –
she jumped on it.’
– Der Spiegel on Axolotl Roadkill
‘Such a debut is very rare...
a masterfully narrated surrealism...
In its ripping rhetorical movement
Axolotl Roadkill ruptures into an
apocalyptic speech, in its literary
gestures almost into absurdity.’
– Die Zeit on Axolotl Roadkill
Carl Hanser Verlag
was established by its eponymous
owner in 1928 in Munich, and its
founder’s interests in both literature
and science have been maintained
to the present day. The firm publishes
fiction and non-fiction for both adults
and children. Its authors include
Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Jostein
Gaarder, Lars Gustafsson, Milan
Kundera, Harry Mulisch, Philip Roth,
Susan Sontag, Botho Strauß, Raoul
Schrott, Rafik Schami, Alfred Brendel,
Elke Heidenreich and ten Nobel Prize
winners, among them Elias Canetti,
whose works have been translated into
more than thirty different languages.
Fiction 3

Friedrich Christian Delius
Die linke Hand des Papstes
(The Pope’s Left Hand)
Rowohlt.Berlin Verlag, September 2013, 128pp. ISBN: 978-3-87134-770-2
When in Rome
The Pope’s Left Hand is an extraordinary, beautifully
constructed novella from one of Germany’s finest
contemporary writers.
It is the first Sunday in March 2011 and the narrator of
The Pope’s Left Hand, a retired archaeologist who now
works as a tour guide in Rome, enters a Lutheran church
to sit for a while before his next tour. He notices the
Pope, dressed in a simple suit and clerical collar, around
twenty feet to his right. Once seated, he is only able to
see the Pope’s hands, and the entire novella consists of the
narrator’s reflections during the time he spends seated in
the church. With the Pope’s hands as his focal point, the
narrator’s thoughts range across millennia of Roman, papal
and Catholic history. He is preoccupied by two subjects
in particular: the role of the horse at the intersection of
Italy’s ecclesiastical and political history, and the debate
surrounding the concept of original sin.
Delius skilfully models the workings of his narrator’s mind,
conjuring a multi-layered cross-referencing of art, history,
politics and religion which is intermingled with the sights
and smells of Rome. The forty Berber horses that Muammar
Gaddafi brought with him to a meeting with Silvio
Berlusconi in Rome make the narrator wonder if the Pope’s
hands might have formed a fist on this occasion, or whether
‘his hands were tied.’ The Berbers remind him in turn of the
eighty Numidian stallions Augustine presented to the Roman
emperor in exchange for the Church accepting Augustine’s
doctrine of original sin. Which, in turn, reminds him of a
one-night stand he had twenty years before.
The narrator is in constant conversation with himself
about Christianity, musing about the Catholic Church’s
role in Nazi Germany and what Romans really think of the
German tourists he guides through the city. At one point the
narrator’s thoughts are compared to the tiles of a mosaic:
one by one they create a portrait of present-day Italy that
the average tourist would never see. When the Pope leaves
the church and the narrator looks at his watch, he realises
that his reflections have barely lasted ten minutes.
The Pope’s Left Hand is full of political high drama as well
as vibrant episodes gleaned from the history of Italy and the
Catholic Church. It is a compelling and unusual narrative
which makes for a deeply rewarding reading experience.
© Jürgen Bauer
Friedrich Christian Delius
was born in Rome in 1943 and grew
up in Central Germany. Some of his
best-known works are Ribbeck’s Pears
(1991), The Sunday I Became World
Champion (1994), The Walk from
Rostock to Syracuse (1995), My Year
as a Murderer (2004) and Portrait
of the Mother as a Young Woman
(2006). Delius has won numerous
awards, most recently the German
Critics’ Prize, the Joseph Breitbach Prize
and the Georg-Büchner-Prize.
Translation rights available from:
Rowohlt.Berlin Verlag GmbH
c/o Rowohlt Verlag GmbH
Hamburger Straße 17
21465 Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany
Contact: Gertje Berger-Maaß
Tel: +49 (0) 40 7272 257
Email: gertje.maass@rowohlt.de
www.rowohlt.de/foreign
Rowohlt.Berlin Verlag
was founded in Berlin in 1990 after
the wall came down. It belongs to
the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Rowohlt.Berlin Verlag publishes literary
fiction as well as political and narrative
non-fiction. Its authors include,
Wolfgang Büscher, Wolfgang Herrndorf,
Herfried Münkler and Kathrin Passig,
amongst many others.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
Previous works:
Der Sonntag, an dem ich
Weltmeister wurde (1994);
Adenauerplatz (1984); Der
Spaziergang von Rostock nach
Syrakus (1995); Mein Jahr als Mörder
(2004); Der Königsmacher (2001)
4 Fiction

Ralph Dutli
Soutines letzte Fahrt
(Soutine’s Last Journey)
Wallstein Verlag, March 2013, 272pp. ISBN: 978-3-8353-1208-1
Longlisted for the
German Book Prize 2013
A portrait of the artist
Soutine’s Last Journey is a powerful textual montage
which documents the French painter’s journey back to Paris
in August 1943. Ralph Dutli’s biographical novel is both
an informative account of Soutine’s life and a bold essay
illuminating his art.
Chaim Soutine’s situation in Nazi-occupied France was
as difficult as can be imagined. Blacklisted both for being
Jewish and a ‘degenerate artist’, he and his companion
Marie-Bethe Aurenche spent a long time on the run in
provincial France. Having been in hiding from the Gestapo
in a safe place outside Paris, Soutine is forced to return
to the city to seek emergency surgery for a stomach ulcer.
To avoid being caught Soutine is transported to the French
capital in a hearse. The journey along the back roads on
6 August 1943 takes twenty-four hours during which Soutine
is dosed up with morphine to ease his pain. The operation
is unsuccessful and Soutine dies on 9 August and is buried
in Montparnasse Cemetery two days later.
Dutli’s magnificent novel positions Soutine’s fever-induced
hallucinations in the hearse on the way to Paris alongside
documentary material and more conventional narrative
sequences. The different kinds of text overlap and sometimes
merge, allowing Dutli to present multiple perspectives on
episodes in Soutine’s life and on the nature of his work.
In this way, Soutine’s final journey to Paris is movingly
contrasted with his first arrival in the art capital of the world,
from his humble beginnings in a poverty-stricken shtetl
near Minsk. Fragmentary sequences transport the reader
from Soutine’s impoverished childhood (and its Jewish ban
on images), to the crowded artists’ ateliers, to Soutine’s
friendship with Modigliani, to his years of recognition.
As well as the real characters from Soutine’s life and career,
there are also intriguing hallucinatory figures, such as the
mysterious doctors in a pristine white hospital who promise
to cure him not only of the ulcer but also of painting itself.
Ralph Dutli transports his readers into the heart of Soutine’s
visual world, animating his portraits of bell-boys and bakers’
assistants and vividly describing the colours Soutine smears
across his surfaces – the reds of every shade which disturb
and disrupt his canvases. This novel achieves the rare feat of
bringing visual art to life on the page in its brilliant depiction
of Soutine’s uncompromising quest to capture both the
present and future of the subject portrayed on the canvas.
© Olivier Dutli
Ralph Dutli
was born in 1954, lives in Heidelberg
and works as a freelance writer, lyricist
and translator; he studied French
and Russian in Zurich and Paris. He
is the editor of the ten-volume Osip
Mandelstam Complete Edition. He
has received well-known prizes and
distinctions, the most recent of which
was the Johann Heinrich Voss Prize
awarded by the German Academy
for Language and Literature. Ralph
Dutli has published more than thirty
books and editions to date, including
the recent publications: Liebe Olive.
Eine kleine Kulturgeschichte (2009)
and Fatrasien. Absurde Poesie des
Mittelalters (2010, 3rd edition).
Translation rights available from:
Wallstein Verlag
Geiststraße 11
37073 Göttingen, Germany
Contact: Stefan Diezmann
Tel: +49 (0)551-54898-12
Email: sdiezmann@wallstein-verlag.de
www.wallstein-verlag.de
‘Dutli’s prose is as colourful as the work
of the praised painter.’ – Hans-Peter
Kunisch, Süddeutsche Zeitung
‘A thrilling novel’ – Verena Auffermann,
personal recommendation SWR-
Bestenliste
‘A glowing novel’ – Beate Tröger,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Wallstein Verlag
was founded as a desktop publishing
company but by 1988 had grown
into a full-scale book publisher. The
firm publishes about 130 titles a year,
ranging from contemporary literature
to history and cultural studies. Its
authors include Ruth Klüger, Gottfried
Benn, Golo Mann, Fred Wander, Gregor
Sander and Ulf Erdmann Ziegler.
‘It is miraculous how a life so violent
and rough can be described in such
a sensible, fragile and smart way.’
– Elke Heidenreich, Schweizer
Literaturclub
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
Fiction 5

Jacks-of-all-trades
The Rise of Literary Agents in the
German Book Market
LitAg 2012
Literary agents have long
played an integral role in the
US and UK publishing scenes.
It is now self-evident that
writers are represented by
agents – those indispensable
masters of negotiation. Andrew
Wylie, renowned for his massive
advances and aggressive business
methods, explains the relationship
as follows: ‘We are engaged to
help, so essentially we do anything
and everything that people want.
Absolutely everything.’ Wylie, also
known as ‘The Jackal’, founded
his agency in New York in 1980
and opened its London branch
in 1996. The most famous of his
over 800 authors include Philip
Roth, Salman Rushdie and V. S.
Naipaul. Across the pond, London
agent Andrew Nurnberg is just
as successful and well-known as
Wylie. His agency first opened its
doors in 1977, later followed by
offices in Moscow, Budapest and
Prague, and his authors include
Doris Lessing and Alex Garland.
The world’s first literary agency,
A. P. Watt, was founded in
London in 1875 and is still
in business today.
By the mid-1990s Germany was
catching up, and literary agencies
began to appear in Berlin that
were modelled on their British
and American counterparts.
Karin Graf was the first, having
previously worked as a translator
from English. Her clients include
some of Germany’s best known
authors, such as Ingo Schulze,
6 Article
Karen Duve and Terézia Mora. Then
came Petra Eggers, a former editor
at one of Germany’s traditional
publishing houses, S. Fischer.
Eggers initially specialised in
authors of non-fiction and, along
with Matthias Landwehr who
quickly came on board, turned
the Eggers & Landwehr agency
into a force to be reckoned with
in Germany’s publishing scene.
Matthias Landwehr in particular
– the former press officer at Berlin
Verlag – acquired a reputation for
negotiating advances of up to half
a million marks for his authors,
on a scale which had previously
been unheard of in Germany. Since
then, the one-time partners have
separated and now they each
run their own highly successful
agencies. Landwehr represents
the likes of Florian Illies, Christian
Kracht, Frank Schirrmacher and
Benjamin Lebert, while Petra
Eggers’ agency acts on behalf of
authors such as Christoph Peters,
Helene Hegemann and Richard
David Precht.
The justification for and
importance of literary agencies is
now rarely up for discussion, even
in Germany, where they were once
seen as charlatans who imposed
themselves unnecessarily between
authors and publishers. Werner
Löcher of the Löcher & Lawrence
literary agency sees the importance
of the role played by his and other
agencies in their capacity to turn
authors into equal partners of the
publishers. There are approximately
one hundred agencies currently
operating in Germany, while
around sixty percent of authors are
represented by agents. Uwe Held,
a literary agent at the Berlin-based
agency Mohrbooks, believes that
this figure will increase further:
‘An author who wants to make
a name for themselves in the
book market doesn’t look for
a publisher anymore, but first
finds themselves an agent.’ The
ever-increasing significance of the
mediating role played by agents
goes hand in hand with changes
in the structures of publishing
organisations and in the way they
operate. Editors are increasingly
becoming programme-managers
who are happy to rely on the work
done by agents, as they themselves
lack the time to sift through the
huge volumes of manuscripts. The
agents are taking on a valuable
filtering function.
Before Berlin became the city
of choice for newly founded
literary agencies, attracted by its
high concentration of authors,
journalists and publishers, Zurich
was the capital of literary agencies
in the German-speaking world.
For more than fifty years the
three traditional agencies of
Mohrbooks, Liepman and Paul
& Peter Fritz have resided in
close proximity to one another in
Switzerland’s literary capital. While
the Swiss trio have a major focus
on English-language literature
(translations from English make
up over sixty percent of books that
© Alexander Heimann / Frankfurter Buchmesse
are translated into German), the
Frankfurt-based agency Mertin
focuses on Portuguese- and
Spanish-language literature from
around the globe. It was founded
in 1982 by the translator Ray-Güde
Mertin – who translated Clarice
Lispector, António Lobo Antunes
and José Saramago, among many
others, into German – and since
Mertin’s death in 2007 the agency
has been led by Nicole Witt.
Today the agency represents 150
authors, sixty percent of whom are
Portuguese-speaking. Witt laments
the dominance of English-language
titles on the German book market:
‘It’s often an uphill struggle.
Many authors from Latin America
are simply not translated.’ While
Spanish ranks in seventh place for
translations on the German book
market, known for its openness to
translated titles, Portuguese is not
even in the top twenty of the most
commonly translated languages.
But that could be about to change.
In the last two years alone more
than forty books have been
translated into German, primarily
from Brazilian Portuguese. Witt
hopes that Brazil’s appearance
as guest of honour at this year’s
Frankfurt Book Fair will have a
lasting effect and that – once
piqued – the interest in Brazilian
literature will remain strong.
By Holger Heimann.
This autumn, at the Frankfurt
Book Fair (9-13 October 2013),
the Literary Agents & Scouts Centre,
known as the ‘LitAg,’ will mark its
thirty-fifth anniversary. In 2013, the
LitAg has sold out all 448 tables
for the second year in a row –
bringing a record number of 619
agents and scouts to the Book Fair.
For more information, please
contact: Riky Stock
rikystock@book-fair.com
Frankfurt Book Fair Literary
Agents & Scouts Centre (LitAg)
www.book-fair.com/litag

The Amazon’s
Writer-in-Residence
This year Germany is the guest
of honour at the 16th Rio Book
Fair. Germany’s appearance
as guest nation is part of the
Germany-Brazil-Year 2013-
2014, whose motto is ‘where
ideas come together’. Cultural
exchange between Brazil and
Germany is being promoted
throughout the year via a rich
variety of artistic and literary
activities. In one such event,
six German authors have been
invited by the Goethe-Institut
to spend four weeks in Brazil as
writers-in-residence in order to
become better acquainted with
the country and its inhabitants
as well as its culture and
history. German author Ingo
Schulze is involved with the
guest of honour programme.
What exactly will you be doing
in Brazil and what are you most
looking forward to?
First of all I am very much looking
forward to seeing friends again,
like the writer and translator
Marcelo Backes. Two years ago
Christine Traber and I made a film
together about the terra preta
– the Amazon’s black soil. Now I
would really like to go and meet
the indigenous people who still
know how to make the black soil
today. And of course I’m looking
forward to Rio de Janeiro too: it’s
one of the world’s most beautiful
cities. I’ve always been drawn to
the beach at Ipanema – there’s
no better place to be during the
German winter. I’m also a great
fan of the ice-cool coconuts –
I’m a very good customer!
© Tobias Bohm
Ingo Schulze
Is your research into terra preta
for a book project? Can you tell
us something about it?
The documentary film was already
research for a book – for the
novel that I have in mind at the
moment. The terra preta suggests
connections for me with the history
of the last 500 years, as well as
with what we call globalisation.
I don’t know yet whether I’ll
manage to make terra preta
into a metaphor.
The Amazon region is an
unusual destination for a
writer-in-residence. How are you
preparing for your six week stay?
We are still anxious about the visa
for travelling to the Kuikuru region.
It’s also just not easy to spend so
much time away. I have no idea
when I was last away for so long.
Besides a pen and paper, what
can you not do without in the
rainforest?
Mosquito spray, a hammock,
biscuits, a boat with enough fuel.
The most important thing of all
though are the people who know
the way, who know where it’s all
right to sleep and where it’s not.
Ingo Schulze was born in 1962
in Dresden, studied classics in
Jena and worked in Altenburg as
a drama advisor and newspaper
editor. He has lived in Berlin
since 1993. His books have won
numerous awards and have been
translated into more than thirty
languages.
Interview: Raphaela Sabel
Both texts translated by
Sheridan Marshall
Highlights of
the Frankfurt
Book Fair 2013
CONTEC Frankfurt
Tues 8 Oct, 8.00am-6.00pm
Marriott Hotel, Frankfurt
CONTEC is a new, highly engaging
event experience created by the
Frankfurt Academy that gathers
stakeholders from across the publishing
ecosystem – from STM and trade
publishers to service providers and tech
startups – in one arena, to redefine and
redesign the experience of publishing.
Publishers Launch Frankfurt
Tues 8 Oct, 8.30am-2.00pm
Room Dimension, hall 4.2,
Frankfurt Book Fair
This packed event will continue and
expand upon today’s key themes of scale
and consolidation across the publishing
world, while also looking at scaling
strategies for vertical publishing – a
natural way to prosper in the shadows
of publishing and retailing giants.
International Rights Directors
Meeting (RDM): Rights Meet
Royalties
Tues 8 Oct, 2.00-5.00pm
Room Europa, hall 4.0,
Frankfurt Book Fair
This year’s International Rights
Directors Meeting will explore two
important themes: Understanding new
digital financial models and exploring
licensing to the Arab world. RDM is
sponsored by CCC and the European
Union Prize for Literature.
What Makes a Beautiful
E-book? Graphics and Design
for Digital Books
Thurs 10 Oct, 9.30am-12.30pm
Room Entente, hall 4.C,
Frankfurt Book Fair
This intensive training session will look
at the importance of taking design and
typography into account when creating
e-books and introduce the latest
developments and possibilities offered
by open standards EPUB 3 and HTML5
for generating complex and media
enriched e-books.
Reading Brazil: The writing
of the disagreement
Thurs 10 Oct, 11.30am-12.30pm
Forum, Level 0, Frankfurt Book Fair
The author of O filho eterno, the
most acclaimed Brazilian book of
recent years, Cristovão Tezza will read
excerpts of his more recent book,
Um erro emocional. Teixeira Coelho,
will present parts of História Natural
da Ditadura – a work in which the
catastrophic experiences of the 20th
century, in Europe and Latin America,
are expressed in a hybrid genre, mixing
essay, memoir and fiction.
A different kind of censorship:
journalists and authors in Mexico
Thurs 10 Oct, 12.00-1.00pm
Stage, Weltempfang – Centre for
Politics, Literature and Translation,
hall 5.0, E 81, Frankfurt Book Fair
Currently, few other countries are
as dangerous for journalists and
authors as Mexico. The drugs mafia
is responsible for intimidating and
murdering critical reporters, and is
forcing many into exile. The author
Ana Lilia Pérez, who had to leave her
country following death threats against
her, joins Urs Jaeggi, journalist Jeanette
Erazo Heufelder and Tobias Voss to
discuss possible ways of supporting
the fight for freedom of expression.
Reading the whole world –
five years of the Weltempfänger
best books list
Thurs 10 Oct, 4.30-5.30pm
Weltempfang – Centre for Politics,
Literature and Translation, hall 5.0, E 81
Frankfurt Book Fair
Weltempfänger has set itself the tasks
of making hitherto unfamiliar voices
heard in Germany, and of charting a
route through each year’s profusion
of new releases. The alternative best
books list, selected by a jury of nine
literary professionals, takes into
consideration all those works that
are not home-grown or well known.
Panellists include the writers Carl Nixon
and Luiz Ruffato.
Frankfurt StoryDrive
Fri 11 Oct, 9.00am-6.00pm
Room Europa, hall 4.0,
Frankfurt Book Fair
StoryDrive is the international forum
for trends and innovation in media
and entertainment. Leaders from
the publishing, film, TV and games
industries, from marketing, design and
sociology, gather here to present their
visionary narrative concepts and to
offer new perspectives on the media
world of tomorrow.
Editors in a Brave New World
Fri 11 Oct, 11am-12.30pm
Room Symmetrie 2+3, hall 8.1,
Frankfurt Book Fair
This discussion panel explores the
changing role of editors in the digital
age, with a focus on children’s publishing.
Ignite Event – Self Publishing
Sat 12 Oct, 10.30am-12.30pm
Publishing Perspectives Stage, hall 8,
Frankfurt Book Fair
The Frankfurt Academy will present
lectures, discussions and roundtables
on the subject of self-publishing. In
addition, authors and providers of
self-publishing platforms or services
will have the opportunity to present
their products and services before an
international audience.
www.book-fair.com/calendar
INterviews and information 7

Michael Fehr
Kurz vor der Erlösung
(The Verge of Release)
Der gesunde Menschenversand, March 2013, 144pp. ISBN: 978-3-905825-51-0
Unto us a boy is born
Michael Fehr’s debut is one of the most original and exciting
contributions to contemporary German-language literature
in recent years. The Verge of Release is already a literary
sensation that is thrilling critics and audiences alike. It won
the Bern Literature Prize within weeks of its publication and
has also been shortlisted for the Franz Tumler Prize for the
best debut novel.
The Verge of Release defies categorisation along the
usual literary lines. Fehr himself calls the book ‘Seventeen
Sentences’ and the beautifully crafted chapters become
a roundelay which tells a version of the Christian Nativity
story. Each ‘sentence’ is told from a different perspective,
with the focus on a different location and on a different
individual or group of people: the farmer, the king, the
foot soldier, the hunter, the men’s choir, Joseph and Mary.
Sentence by sentence, line by line, word by word, the
narrator closes in on the central event from all these
different angles. In the lamplight the farmer makes an
unexpected discovery in his stable; at the inn a male
choir bursts into song; a king follows a star in the sky; and
someone who appears to be a fisherman contemplates the
icy water. Most of the chapters close with the sound of
cathedral bells ringing or with cries of Hallelujah. Recurring
phrases and motifs – repetitions and variations – as well as
wonderful images and brilliant use of rhythm, sound and
humour help to carry the reader on a breathtaking journey.
The extraordinary appeal of Fehr’s writing can be partly
explained by its stunningly beautiful poetic sound. Recurring
phrases and images are woven into the narrative and
imbue it with a haunting splendour. Fehr achieves an almost
hypnotic hold on his readers through his musical diction and
rhythmic repetition. This effect is a product of the author’s
style of composition: instead of writing, Fehr speaks and
listens and then records the fragments which come to make
up the novel’s ‘sentences’. Only then is the text transcribed.
Each sentence extends over several pages, with line breaks
which help to convey the wonderful rhythm by suggesting
the intended phrasing and pacing.
Audiences have been captivated by Michael Fehr’s readings,
and readers – whether reading aloud or quietly following
the text – find themselves transported by this exquisite
story of many voices as though they were listening to an
orchestral concert.
‘The sentences create an irresistible
musical maelstrom, and speak to
the reader’s imagination through
their visual power.’
– NZZ am Sonntag
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Switzerland (see page 40)
© Patrick Savolainen
Michael Fehr
was born in Muri near Bern in 1982
and resides in Bern. Fehr played
the drums for thirteen years, took
percussion classes and studied business
and law, but never got his degree.
He then studied at the Swiss Literary
Institute and at the College of the
Arts in Bern, where he finished his
MA in Contemporary Arts Practice.
He has been part of numerous events
such as the Berner Biennale and the
Berner Literary Festival and has been
frequently published in magazines
and journals. His first publication
Kurz vor der Erlösung was awarded
one of the literary prizes of the canton
Bern in June 2013. Fehr is one of the
five authors nominated for the Franz
Tumler Prize 2013. Awards and grants
include the Literatur-Mentoring –
Kanton Bern, the Werkbeitrag der
Abteilung Kulturelles der Stadt Bern
and theBEST – Trächsel-Stipendium
zum Berufseinstieg.
Translation rights available from:
Der gesunde Menschenversand
Neuweg 10
CH-6003 Luzern, Switzerland
Contact: Matthias Burki
Tel: +41 41 360 65 05
Email: info@menschenversand.ch
www.menschenversand.ch
‘… Fehr piles up his vibrant language
sculptures, honed by the stylistic
devices of repetition and variation,
with “Swissisms” at their glowing
semantic core…’ – Der Bund
Menschenversand
is a publishing house fraction of
Spoken Word and was founded
by Matthias Burki and Yves Thomi
(until 2007) in 1998. The flourishing
Menschenversand survives to this
day. In 2006 Menschenversand
was awarded the Canton of Bern’s
Förderpreis für Kulturvermittlung, and
in 2007 it received the Migros-Jubilée-
Award in der Sparte Literatur.
8 DEBUTS

Sarah Stricker
Fünf Kopeken
(Five Kopeks)
Eichborn, September 2013, 512pp. ISBN: 978-3-84790-535-6
A man is not where he lives, but where he loves
Sarah Stricker’s exceptional debut novel confronts the
thorny issue of German-Jewish relations head-on and
without any of the usual clichés. Stricker’s journalistic
acumen and unswerving comic instinct combine to make
Five Kopeks an unflinching and drop-dead funny
family drama.
Anna, the narrator of Five Kopeks, recalls her life story in a
series of flashbacks. Her tyrannical grandfather’s obsession
with his time as a PoW in a Soviet camp and his brutal
attempts to instil a sense of duty into his ugly daughter
do not sound like the ingredients of a funny novel, and yet
Stricker’s gift for storytelling has the reader in stitches.
The grandfather abhors superficiality and encourages
his daughter’s assiduity in school while discouraging any
attempts she makes to look nice. His wife surreptitiously
tries to rouge her daughter’s cheeks or to give her nicer
glasses but her husband always seems to have the upper
hand. The ugly daughter turns out to be a child prodigy but
is emotionally immature long after she becomes an adult.
There are excruciatingly funny passages recounting the
daughter’s first late-night disco and pubescent experiences.
There is a bracing clarity in Stricker’s language as she
describes how Anna’s mother denies her feelings for the
man who becomes her husband and stumbles into an
amour fou for the chauvinistic Russian-Jewish Alex. On one
occasion she spends a night in a hotel with Alex behind her
husband’s back. Nothing goes to plan and the episode is
full of dramatic tension. The next morning she muses aloud
about what they might call a child if they got married, and
is taken aback by Alex’s revelation that, despite being a
non-believer, he would never marry her because she is not a
Jew. The ensuing discussion ranges across the barriers which
prevent a converted Jew from being accepted as Jewish, and
what it means to be Jewish in contemporary Germany
Nothing feels hackneyed or predictable about this novel:
not the plot, not the language and not the sex scenes that
are by turns hilarious and erotic. Anna’s narration is an
homage to her shrill, unconventional mother who knows
less than her daughter about love and the way the world
works. This is an edgy, clever work of fiction that is tragicomic
in the best sense.
A sample translation of this title
is available on the NBG website
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
© Olivier Favre
Sarah Stricker
was born in 1980 and wrote for the
taz, Vanity Fair and numerous German
newspapers and magazines, such as
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung and Neon. In
2009, she was given a scholarship to
go to Tel Aviv where she stayed to work
as a foreign correspondent, reporting
for the German media about Israel and
the Israeli media about Germany.
Fünf Kopeken is her debut novel.
Translation rights available from:
Eichborn
Schanzenstrasse 6 - 20
D-51063 Cologne, Germany
Contact: Jutta Willand-Sellner
Tel: +49 221 82002683
Email: jutta.willand@eichborn.de
www.eichborn.de
Eichborn
is the publisher of Look Who’s Back
by Timur Vermes, a novel playfully
asking what would happen if Hitler
were alive today. It turned out to
be THE German novel of the year.
Published in September 2012, it
instantly entered the top ranks of the
best-seller list where it is still sitting
(nineteen weeks as number one).
Translation rights have been sold in
more than thirty territories (World
English: Maclehose Press/Quercus).
Many works published by Eichborn
have been translated into English,
including A Woman in Berlin by
Anonymous, The Old Child, The Book
of Words and Visitation by Jenny
Erpenbeck, The 13 ½ Lives of Captain
Bluebear by Walter Moers, W.G.
Sebald’s The Emigrants, The Rings
of Saturn and Vertigo as well as Ice
Moon, Silence and The Winter of
the Lions by Jan Costin Wagner.
Eichborn became a division of Bastei
Luebbe, Germany’s largest independent
publishing group in 2011, and
continues to discover and to establish
original and exciting authors’ voices.
DEBUTS 9

Henriette Vásárhelyi
immeer
(Beyond the Horizon)
Dörlemann Verlag, August 2013, 192pp. ISBN: 978-3-90877-793-9
All at sea
Henriette Vásárhelyi’s keenly anticipated debut novel
opens on a summertime beach on the Baltic coast, with an
exuberant play-fight in the sand between two men and a
young woman, all of them carefree and innocent. The novel
ends having come full circle on another beach – this time,
on the Italian island of Elba, where the woman is now alone
and silenced by grief. In between, Vásárhelyi tells the story
of the twenty-something Eva Blach and her terminally ill
friend Jan Strübing.
Eva shares an apartment in Berlin with Jan and their mutual
friend Heiner. The three are an inseparable team from a
provincial Baltic town who have moved to the capital to
satisfy their insatiable appetite for life with no thought for
the future. However, we learn that Jan never had a future,
having been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain
cancer as a teenager. As Jan’s health deteriorates, their
three-way relationship becomes troubled. Heiner and Eva
fall out for good after she maliciously reports him to the
police for drug possession and their flat is raided. Heiner
subsequently moves out and Eva loses a friend and ally.
She then cares for Jan, witnessing his rapid decline in health
in all its gory detail. He becomes aggressive, adopts strange
habits, loses control of his bodily functions and is finally
transferred to a hospice, awaiting a premature death.
In the weeks and months after Jan’s funeral Eva describes
how she goes about her everyday activities and how even
the simplest action is burdened with memories and meaning.
The only interruption in her withdrawn post-Jan life arises
as a result of a coincidence. When Eva begins a relationship
with an old acquaintance of Heiner’s he takes her on holiday
to Elba, convinced that this milder and altogether friendlier
place will help to cure her of her melancholy. But Eva is
clearly not ready to leave Jan behind.
This slim novel manages to feel both floatingly effortless
and intense at the same time. It is beautifully written, its
language crystal clear and poetic, with moments of youthful
irreverence, quoting song lyrics and poetry with nonchalance.
For a text that deals with something as intangible as grief
and loss, it has a very real presence and is populated with
objects, events and physical sensations. Its structure is
masterful, ebbing and flowing as the narrator’s present
experiences give way to her memories. Beyond the Horizon
is an ambitious and subtle prose work to be savoured.
© Judith Dannhauer
Henriette Vàsàrhelyi
was born in 1977 in East Berlin and
grew up in Mecklenburg. She finished
her training as a Management
Assistant of IT-Systems and studied at
the German Literary Institute in Leipzig.
She is currently studying to finish her
MA in Contemporary Arts Practice at
the University of the Arts in Bern.
She lives with her family in Biel.
Translation rights available from:
Dörlemann Verlag
Forchstrasse 21
CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland
Contact: Sabine Dörlemann
Tel: +41 44 251 00 25
Email: verlag@doerlemann.com
www.doerlemann.com
Dörlemann
is a Swiss publishing house, based in
Zurich. Founded in 2003, it publishes a
mix of fiction and non-fiction from both
new and established writers. Authors
include Sandra Hughes, Jens Steiner
(longlisted for the German Book Prize
in 2011) and Jolanda Piniel, nominated
for the best independent book of 2012
published in German.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Switzerland (see page 40)
10 DEBUTS

Stefanie de Velasco
Tigermilch
(Tigermilk)
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, August 2013, 280pp, ISBN: 978-3-462-04573-4
An unforgettable summer
‘Tigermilk’ is the signature drink of two teenage friends.
Nini and Jameelah hide their heady concoction of brandy,
milk and passion fruit juice in Müller milk cartons in order
to fool unsuspecting adults. Stefanie de Velasco’s exciting
debut novel is as intoxicating as tigermilk, but its pleasures
are longer lasting.
Nini and Jameelah believe that nothing can go wrong as
long as they are together. They invent a world governed by
their own rules, in which friendship takes the place of family.
Bold and fiercely independent, both girls have had difficult
upbringings. Nini’s father left years ago and her mother
spends most of her time asleep on the couch. Jameelah is
an Iraqi refugee whose father and brother were killed in the
war, and who now faces deportation after receiving a letter
from the German authorities. The girls pledge to live life to
the full in what might be their final summer together. In the
last week of school before the holidays, they meet in the
toilets each afternoon to mix their tigermilk before heading
into downtown Berlin. There they go to the red light district
to pick up men, a new pastime which earns them extra cash
and lets them ‘practise’ having sex. When fourteen-year-old
Nini puts a condom on with her mouth for the first time the
taste reminds her of the chewing gum that she once picked
up off the floor as a child – and in the act of remembering
the gum she realises that she is not a child anymore.
In what feels like an endless summer the scenes are redolent
with the scent of sun lotion, French fries and sex. Things
become more intense when the girls witness a stabbing in
a playground involving their neighbourhood friends which
Jameelah believes to be an honour killing. Their friendship is
tested by their disagreement about whether they should tell
the police and the once promising summer crumbles around
them. By the time the summer holidays finish, everything
has changed forever. When Jameelah is sent back to Iraq and
Nini says goodbye at the airport, she realises that all the
happiness she has ever known is contained within that one
friendship: its secrets, the conversations and the tigermilk.
Tigermilk approaches difficult issues such as immigration,
honour killings, underage sex and teenage pregnancy in a
refreshingly bold, unflinching way. This raw and arresting
coming-of-age story pays startling attention to the detail
of its characters’ lives and achieves a nuanced rendering
of a gritty teenage perspective.
A sample translation of this title
is available on the NBG website
© Joachim Gern
Stefanie de Velasco
was born in 1978 and studied
European Ethnology and Political
Sciences in Bonn, Berlin and Warsaw.
In 2011 she received the Literature
Prize Prenzlauer Berg for the first
chapters of her debut. She received
several writing scholarships. She lives
and works in Berlin.
Translation rights sold:
Italy (Bompiani), Netherlands
(Signatuur), Czech Republic
(Plus Publishing), France (Belfond),
Great Britain (Head of Zeus)
Translation rights available from:
Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG
Bahnhofsvorplatz 1
50667 Cologne, Germany
Contact: Iris Brandt
Tel: +49 221 3768522
Email: ibrandt@kiwi-verlag.de
www.kiwi-verlag.de
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch
was founded in 1949 in Cologne by
two publishers from the Eastern Zone,
Gustav Kiepenheuer and Joseph Caspar
Witsch. The press’s early authors
included Joseph Roth, Heinrich Böll
and Erich Maria Remarque. Today
Kiepenheuer & Witsch continues to
publish leading contemporary German,
Austrian and Swiss writers, as well as
international authors in translation.
Its list includes Katja Lange-Müller,
Peter Härtling, Uwe Timm, Gabriel
García Márquez and John Banville.
Its non-fiction subjects cover sociology,
psychology, history and biography.
Kiepenheuer & Witsch is part of the
Holtzbrinck Group.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
DEBUTS 11

Katharina Hartwell
Das Fremde Meer
(The Strange Sea)
Berlin Verlag, July 2013, 567pp. ISBN: 978-3-8270-1137-4
A fairytale existence
Katharina Hartwell is a thoughtful and ambitious writer
with a gift for story-telling. Her deftly written first novel is
a pleasingly original tale with a potentially tragic love story
at its heart that slips from a recognisable present into an
imaginative realm.
Marie is an unusually worried child with the exception of
some early childhood years spent at her grandparents’ home
with its large, wild garden and the woods beyond. There
she was a fearless leader in the games with local children,
urging them to climb trees to the top and make the most of
their freedom. When the family moves back to the city Marie
finds it difficult to make friends. She falls into a solitary
bookish existence and resigns herself to the fact that a quiet
academic life may be the one for her. Fearful of change and
anything unpredictable, Marie convinces herself that it is
possible to avoid catastrophe and disaster just by expecting
those things.
But when Marie falls deeply in love with Jan, a photography
student, she discovers that she simply cannot prepare
herself for every eventuality. One evening Jan is knocked
off his bike by a car. He is seriously injured and falls into
a coma. Marie struggles to find a way to encourage
him back to life until her imagination comes into its own,
weaving stories just for him in which he will recognise the
two of them as characters and which always end with the
promise of reunion and salvation. These stories are a rich
mix of science fiction and fairytale: the princess rescuing
the prince, the beautiful tarot card reader rescuing the
‘ghost-boy’ from the circus, the mysterious stranger in the
belly of the ship that delivers souls to the land of the dead
who rescues those she feels do not belong there. The sea in
The Strange Sea comes to symbolise life itself, its capricious
nature and the challenge of navigating it intact. Each tale
features a heroine whose name begins with ‘M’ and a young
man whose name begins with ‘J’ or ‘Y’, and each one shares
a narrative of separation followed by an eventual reunion.
The reader does not realise until the end of the novel what
role these made-up stories play in the ‘real’ story of Marie
and Jan.
The Strange Sea exhibits a skilfully light touch and a
delightfully rich vocabulary which guarantees a diverting
reading experience.
A sample translation of this title
is available on the NBG website
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
© Tobias Bohm
Katharina Hartwell
was born in Cologne in 1984 and
read English and American Studies,
graduating with distinction. A student
at the Leipzig Institute for Literature
since 2010, she published a collection
of short stories, Im Eisluftballon
(‘In the Frozen-Air Balloon’). Katharina
Hartwell has won numerous writer’s
grants and prizes.
Translation rights available from:
Berlin Verlag
Hedemannstraße 14
10969 Berlin, Germany
Contact: Hanna Dürholt
Tel: +49 (0)89 381 801 735
Email: hanna.duerholt@berlinverlag.de
www.berlinverlag.de
‘A love story so grand and beautiful
and sad that one really must try to
save it with all means and genres
literature can offer.’ – Spiegel online
‘A sublime debut. Magical and
disturbing.’ – NDR
‘Gripping, often tragic, and – not
least – delightfully consequential.’
– Zeit online
Berlin Verlag
was founded in 1994 as an
independent publishing house and
publishes approximately forty titles per
year. The list combines international
and German literary fiction and a
non-fiction program. Several young
German authors have made a
successful publishing debut with
Berlin Verlag, and many authors are
internationally renowned prize-winners.
Berlin Verlag has been part of the
Bonnier Group since 2012.
‘She delivers a daring but convincing
debut. (…) Having finished reading,
admiration prevails for this high-wire
act that wants to prove at all costs
what literature can do – if it dares to
leave its secure loopholes.’
– Deutschlandradio
12 DEBUTS

Amanda DeMarco, publisher of Readux, talks to NBG
The Back Story
Amanda DeMarco worked in publishing
in the United States before moving to
Germany in 2009. Being based in Berlin
gave her both the creative impetus
and the financial freedom to create
start-up publisher Readux, whose first
four books were announced in July and
will be launched this October. Amanda
was also inspired by her work with
Swedish short-form publisher Novellix,
who publish four high quality books
every quarter, each of around thirty
pages long. Amanda loved the concept,
and decided to adopt a similar model
for Readux.
The Format
Readux will publish essays and stories
of between 5,000 and 10,000 words in
length, mainly in translation. Its books
will be released in sets of four, three
times a year, and each set will include
one text by an English-language writer.
This decision has been made ‘very
consciously’, says Amanda, who wants
people to think of Readux books as
great texts in their own right, whether
they are translations or not. Readux
aims to give readers access to a wealth
of texts which are currently not being
published because they are too long to
appear in magazines but too short to
be novellas: ‘The format is perfect for
right now,’ says Amanda. Readux books
are affordable and can be read in one
sitting, either electronically or in print;
the printed books are designed to be
beautiful objects that people will want
to own. There is no shortage of talented
designers in Berlin, as Amanda points
out, and the striking covers of the first
four books are certainly proof of this.
The bold, vibrant designs are the work
of André Gottschalk, an award-winning
Berlin-based illustrator.
The Books
Thanks to its location in Berlin and its
collaboration with Novellix, Readux
has strong ties to both German and
Swedish literature; one of its four
October titles is translated from
Swedish and two are translated
from German. Living in Berlin makes
Amanda’s relationship with German
literature very different from what it
would have been had she stayed in
the US. She is able to meet authors
in person, understand the social
conditions from which their books
arise, and keep up with developments
in the German literary scene as they
happen. Because of this – and because
the texts are short and therefore quick
to translate – Readux is able to publish
translations hot on the heels of original
texts (two of the three translated texts
due to be released in October were also
published in their original languages
in 2013).
The Translators
Amanda is herself a translator from
German and has translated one of the
titles in Readux’s October selection,
the essay In Berlin by Franz Hessel.
Another of the titles, The Marvel
of Biographical Bookkeeping
(‘a great story, very readable, formally
very unusual and innovative’) was
translated by Katy Derbyshire, who
Amanda met through an And Other
Stories reading group the two ran
together in Berlin. Translators have
given Amanda many ‘wonderful
suggestions’ for texts to add to
Readux’s list in the future.
The Future
Readux books will be available online,
via subscription and in bookshops in
Germany, the UK and the US. One of
Amanda’s main aims in the long term
is to build up Readux’s distribution
network, and she also hopes eventually
to be able to publish more than three
sets of books a year. She is optimistic
about the future, pointing out that
a number of small presses set up in
recent years have helped to cultivate
a readership with an interest in
translated literature. There is much
more awareness and discussion of
literature in translation now than
there was five years ago, she says,
which is great news for Readux and
other publishers like it. With such an
interesting line-up already announced,
NBG is looking forward to seeing what
exciting new titles Readux will have to
offer in 2014.
Interview with Romy Fursland.
NBG interviews the translator Jamie Bulloch
How did you get into translation
and how has your career
developed? Have you worked
closely with any particular
publishers?
It had not been my original intention
to become a translator, but when my
attempts to secure a full-time academic
career as a historian were thwarted
I started to consider it as a serious
option. My first commission for a
literary translation was awarded on
the basis of a sample I had been asked
to prepare for the publisher. Since then
I have been fortunate to be in regular
work, enjoying good contacts with a
number of publishers, including Atlantic,
Peirene Press and MacLehose Press.
What have been your most
enjoyable translation projects?
My wife and I co-translated two novels
by Daniel Glattauer – Love Virtually
and its sequel, Every Seventh Wave
– both in email format, for which I
translated the male character and she
the female one. We then spent many
evenings editing the text together
until we were happy with the finished
product. I’m currently working on
Timur Vermes’ Er ist wieder da, a
hugely entertaining satire on modern
German life seen through the eyes of
a resurrected Adolf Hitler. I have just
finished the first draft and now my
task is to inject life into the English
text and render it as funny as the
German original.
Do you get in touch with the
living writers you translate?
To be able to translate a phrase
successfully, you really need to be
able to understand it down to the
most basic detail. There is no better
substitute for achieving this than
consulting the person who wrote it in
the first place. With Er ist wieder da,
I actually had the great fortune to spend
a week in Germany with the author
and eleven other translators of the
novel, working with languages ranging
from Chinese to Macedonian. We sat
around a large table and discussed the
book page by page, addressing every
query. It was quite an experience.
Do you tend to translate one
book at a time, or have several
projects on the go at once?
What are you working on at
the moment?
I will only translate one book at a time,
but in the middle of one job you will
frequently receive queries from an
editor regarding a previous translation,
so in that sense you can be working
on a number of books simultaneously.
As I mentioned, I am working on the
Timur Vermes satire at present. In the
pipeline I have another novel by Daniel
Glattauer as well as Jörg Fauser’s
classic Rohstoff, which has been
reissued in Germany to great acclaim.
Which book(s) would you still
like to translate?
One great book which I loved when
I read it a few years ago was Kristof
Magnusson’s Das war ich nicht,
featuring a translator as one of the
main protagonists!
Do you have a favourite translated
work by somebody else?
I particularly enjoyed Umberto Eco’s
Prague Cemetery and am sure that
Richard Dixon’s fine translation had a
lot to do with that. But – and I know
that this is a very unoriginal choice
– my favourite would have to be the
Asterix books translated by Anthea Bell
and Derek Hockridge. I remember the
disbelief I felt when I discovered that
these had not been written in English
originally. They are prime examples
of the confident, risk-taking, creative
approach which all translators need
to adopt if we are to convince the
wider Anglophone public that foreign
literature is worth reading.
What advice would you give
to new translators?
For those trying to get a foot on
the ladder, I would write to those
publishers who do include translated
literature in their lists, and offer to
become a reader for them. The pay
for this will be virtually non-existent,
but it will establish contact between
you and commissioning editors, and
you might just be in the right place
at the right time when one of your
favourable reports on a book arouses
some interest. Likewise, I would offer to
produce sample translations. There are
many instances where a publisher buys
a book and only then embarks on the
quest to find a suitable translator for it.
Interview with Jenny Watson.
interviews 13

Matthias Politycki
Samarkand Samarkand
(Samarkand Samarkand)
Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, August 2013, 400pp. ISBN: 978-3-455-40443-2
Back to the future
The latest novel from acclaimed author Matthias Politycki
is an ambitious work that has been some twenty-five years
in the writing and will keep readers intrigued from start
to finish.
Samarkand Samarkand is the story of one man’s quest
to save the West from total destruction. The novel is set
between 2027 and 2029, against the backdrop of a Third
World War which has seen Germany fall to two competing
world powers: Russia and the newly established Caliphate.
Alexander Kaufner, a former frontier runner, is tasked
with travelling to Samarkand. His mission is to locate the
whereabouts of Timur’s fourteenth-century grave and
destroy the sometime ruler of the Muslim world’s sacred
bones which, as legend has it, have conferred wartime
invincibility on his descendants.
The title of the novel is programmatic: there is a second
Samarkand located deep in the mountains, the polar
opposite of the World Heritage Site to which tourists and
pilgrims flock each year. It is there at an ancient cultic site
that Kaufner suspects the key to the mystery lies. With his
guide, Odina, he must traverse the mountains of Central
Asia, battling the elements and the onset of war, not to
mention the ghosts of his own past while the burden of the
Western World’s survival sits heavily on his ageing shoulders.
Fortunately he has a guardian angel in Shochi, who is the
daughter of his contact in modern-day Samarkand and a
teenage girl possessing the gift of second sight. Shochi is
a surrogate child for Kaufner who has lost his own wife
and daughter in the madness enveloping Germany and it
is through her that he finds the courage to see his mission
through to the end.
Samarkand Samarkand is an epic novel written in an
impeccable literary style which deals not only with our
relationship to the foreign but also with the nature of
history itself. What is human history, the novel asks, if not a
series of repetitions – a cycle of triumph and decline played
out against the indifference of the natural world around us?
Politycki’s narrative leads the reader over winding mountain
passes, through a war-ravaged twenty-first century that is
no longer recognisable but nonetheless utterly plausible.
This arresting version of 2028 is full of the sort of brutality
and violence we might associate with the Middle Ages and
is sure to captivate contemporary readers.
© Mathias Bothor/photoselection
Matthias Politycki
was born in 1955 in Karlsruhe,
Germany and is one of Germany’s most
critically acclaimed literary authors.
He has published over twenty novels
and poetry collections. His books have
sold over 200,000 copies and have
been translated into several languages,
including English, French, and Italian.
His novel Next World Novella
(Jenseitsnovelle) was published in
2009 and has been received with
critical praise in Germany, England,
and France.
Translation rights sold:
France (Actes Sud, Editions Jacqueline
Chambon)
Translation rights available from:
Hoffmann und Campe Verlag
Harvestehuder Weg 42
20149 Hamburg, Germany
Contact: Katharina Muders
Tel: +49 4044188281
Email: foreign.rights@hoca.de
www.hoca.de
Hoffmann und Campe,
founded in 1781, is a publishing house
with a long tradition and today one of
Germany’s largest and most successful
general publishers with a portfolio that
embraces the works of famous authors
and young writing talents. Since 1951
all works by the eminent narrative
writer Siegfried Lenz have been
published by Hoffmann und Campe.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
Previous works:
Herr der Hörner (2005);
Weiberroman (2009);
Next World Novella (2009);
London for Heroes (2011)
14 Fiction

Markus Ramseier
Vogelheu
(Birds’ Hay)
Haymon Verlag, July 2013, 336pp. ISBN: 978-3-7099-7013-3
A granddaughter speaks
Nineteen-year-old Flo loves her grandfather more
than anyone else in her life. To others her grandfather
is renowned as a wine grower, inventor, left-wing
environmentalist, gifted storyteller and charismatic ladies’
man, but he and Flo share a special bond which matters
more than any of these things. Markus Ramseier’s novel
opens with a terrifying fire that starts in the hut close to
the grandfather’s vineyard, just hours after the end of his
seventieth birthday party. Flo’s grandfather is severely
injured and has to be flown to the nearest hospital by
helicopter. Most of his home is destroyed, including
his precious collection of snails, carefully preserved in
formaldehyde. After the fire the vineyards – known as
‘Paradise’ – are all that he has left. Tensions rise in the
family when Flo’s father plans to expand the hotel he
bought from Flo’s grandfather and transform the entire
area into a spa resort even though this would mean the
destruction of the vineyards and the snails’ habitat.
The police investigate the fire while Flo, already alienated
from her ambitious parents, wanders around the hotel and
grounds. The investigators suspect her of knowing more
about the origins of the fire than she lets on. She loses her
virginity to a visiting medical student and is nearly seduced
by a biologist from Florida who is also interested in the
Paradise snails. Throughout the text she questions her own
possible guilt. Most of all she longs for simpler times and
a return to her idyllic childhood with her grandfather. The
poetic descriptions of the landscape contrast with those
highlighting the confusion and conflict that torment Flo.
Markus Ramseier raises some important questions in the
course of this admirably poised and subtle novel, asking
about the sort of places that really matter to people:
a palatial spa hotel or a grandparent’s humble home?
Questions about environmental protection and the dilemma
of how to balance technological progress with traditional
values are unobtrusively posed alongside his thoughtful
portrayal of the oddities and fractures of everyday life.
When Flo’s grandfather is diagnosed with terminal cancer
she rescues him on their beloved red tractor, taking him
back to his vineyard and his hut. Flo and her grandfather’s
former lovers care for him until he dies, leaving his vineyard
to Flo. The novel’s outstanding achievement is its enchanting
depiction of the tender relationship between grandfather
and granddaughter.
© Private
Markus Ramseier
was born in 1955 in Liestal,
Switzerland, and lives as an author,
place name researcher and freelance
editor in Pratteln. He previously worked
as a teacher, journalist and editor for a
publishing house. He has been awarded
numerous prizes for his literary work,
such as the Bookprize of the Canton
Bern in 1995 and the Bettina-von-
Arnim-Prize in 2001.
Previous works:
Licht. Geschichten (2009)
Translation rights available from:
Haymon Verlag
Erlerstraße 10
A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Contact: Anna Stock
Tel: +43 512 576300 21
Email: anna.stock@haymonverlag.at
www.haymonverlag.at
Haymon Verlag
was established in 1982 by the
historian, journalist and author Michael
Forcher as a non-fiction publishing
company. The Haymon Verlag is named
after a giant named Haymon who,
according to an old legend, founded
the Stift Wilten monastery near
Innsbruck in the eighth century. It was
one of the first cultural centres in the
region that later became known as
the Tyrol. Since 1988, it has primarily
published German-language and
international literature. Haymon Verlag
has been a subsidiary company of the
Studienverlag since September 2004.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Switzerland (see page 40)
Fiction 15

Uwe Timm
Vogelweide
(The Bird Meadow)
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, August 2013, 335pp. ISBN: 978-3-462-04571-0
Longlisted for the
German Book Prize 2013
A bird in the hand...
The Bird Meadow is an insightful, self-contained novel
which muses on the subjects of desire, morality and justice.
This is a quieter work than many of Uwe Timm’s previous
works, but no less enjoyable for that.
Christian Eschenbach has lost his IT business, apartment
and his beloved Saab to bankruptcy, his wife to a hippie
lifestyle in Goa, his daughter to the world of finance
and most recently – and painfully – his lover, Anna. Now
Eschenbach is spending six months living on a tiny island,
a bird sanctuary in the North Sea, where he is filling in
as the official bird watcher. And so he observes the birds,
follows the tides, writes a piece on Jonah and the whale
that he’s long wanted to complete and thinks back on his
affair with Anna, a married art teacher, whom he met at
a gallery opening.
At their first meeting Anna had been accompanied by her
architect husband, while Eschenbach was with his thengirlfriend.
The two couples become friends, but he and
Anna have a special chemistry that leads them to embark
upon an affair. Eventually Anna will confess the affair to
her husband, take her two children and leave for the US,
just as Eschenbach’s life falls apart. Following his downfall,
Eschenbach has a short stint as a statistical researcher on
desire but he never believes that it is possible for desire
to be measured, let alone predicted. He doesn’t even buy
into the algorithmic matches made by internet dating sites.
So, five years after his fall from grace, for a lack of better
options and the promise of peace and quiet, he comes to
the island and lives his monastic life. That’s when Anna calls
to announce a visit. They spend one night together and talk,
including about Anna’s four-year-old son Jonah, who might
or might not be Eschenbach’s. Anna makes peace with him
and tells him that she has leukaemia. The novel ends with
Eschenbach looking at Anna in the morning light, musing
about how the justice that the biblical Jonah demanded
from God doesn’t actually exist.
The Bird Meadow is infused with a wonderful sense of
calm and has a gentle, forgiving tone. There is a meditative
pleasure in following Eschenbach in his daily rituals on the
island – drinking tea, and collecting and recycling beached
objects – accentuated by Timm’s tersely evocative style.
A sample translation of this title
is available on the NBG website
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
© Inge Zimmermann
Uwe Timm
was born in 1940 and has worked as a
freelance writer since 1971. Uwe Timm
was awarded both the Premio Napoli
and the Premio Mondello in 2006,
received the Heinrich Böll Prize in 2009
and the Carl Zuckmayer Medal in 2012.
Except for his children´s books, Uwe
Timm´s works have been published
by Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Rights to
Uwe Timm’s books have been sold
to numerous countries. Am Beispiel
meines Bruders has been translated
into nineteen languages, among them
English, Spanish and French.
Previous works:
Among others: Morenga (1978);
The Snake Tree (1986); The Invention
of Curried Sausage (1993);
In the Shadow of My Brother (2003);
Penumbra (2008)
Translation rights sold:
Netherlands (Podium)
Translation rights available from:
Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG
Bahnhofsvorplatz 1
50667 Cologne, Germany
Contact: Iris Brandt
Tel: +49 221 3768522
Email: ibrandt@kiwi-verlag.de
www.kiwi-verlag.de
Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch
was founded in 1949 in Cologne by
two publishers from the Eastern Zone,
Gustav Kiepenheuer and Joseph Caspar
Witsch. The press’s early authors
included Joseph Roth, Heinrich Böll
and Erich Maria Remarque. Today
Kiepenheuer & Witsch continues to
publish leading contemporary German,
Austrian and Swiss writers, as well as
international authors in translation.
Its list includes Katja Lange-Müller,
Peter Härtling, Uwe Timm, Gabriel
García Márquez and John Banville.
Its non-fiction subjects cover sociology,
psychology, history and biography.
Kiepenheuer & Witsch is part of the
Holtzbrinck Group.
16 Fiction

Anna Weidenholzer
Der Winter tut den Fischen gut
(Winter is Good for Fish)
Residenz Verlag, September 2012, 240pp. ISBN: 978-3-70171-583-1
Only the lonely
Winter is Good for Fish is a wholly unsentimental novel
about loneliness, unfulfilled dreams and the sense of being
overwhelmed by life. Its unique tone – crystal clear and yet
somewhat distanced – provides an exquisite perspective
through which to explore these themes, laying bear the
central character’s vulnerability.
Maria would have liked to be a singer. If Eduard had only
come back as he had promised he would. Instead when he
came back it was with a girl from the town, and the girl
was pregnant. Maria stopped dreaming and trained to be
a haberdasher. She learned about fabrics and colours and
dressmaking patterns. She paid attention to her appearance
– a slim figure and manicured hands were essential for her
profession – and married Walter, a car mechanic and Elvisimpersonator.
She moved in with him to her parents-in-laws’
house on the other side of the village until they could afford
to rent an apartment in town.
The novel opens as Maria is waiting to see a counsellor: she
reflects that she has achieved her modest goals but has not
had sufficient faith in herself. The narrative then proceeds
in reverse from Chapter 54, as the apparently middle-aged
Maria gets up one morning, until Chapter 1, in which we see
the child Maria in the kitchen helping her aunt. In the course
of the story we learn about Maria’s long, unhappy marriage
to Walter, that she has worked in a clothes boutique for
many years and recently been made redundant, that she has
a married sister and a handful of close women friends, that
when she was younger she had jilted her boyfriend Eduard
in favour of Walter, and that her pet frog Otto froze to death
when she put him in the fridge to hibernate. The childless
Maria lives in a block of flats and now spends most of her
days sitting in the market place watching the world go by.
Anna Weidenholzer’s well-received novel is remarkable for
its understated, pared-down diction which perfectly captures
Maria’s demeanour as she veers between melancholy
and mirth. She has a precise eye for small details which
bring Maria’s humdrum, disappointed existence so vividly
to life. This is a minutely observed paean to the human
condition as it is experienced by apparently unremarkable
people, illuminating the daily rituals, the failure of real
communication, the absurdities, banalities and vicissitudes
of the lives under scrutiny.
‘Her literary language is very reduced,
but each and every word suits. And
with every sentence the reader gets
more curious.’ – TAZ, Catarina von
Wedemeyer
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Austria (see page 40)
© Lukas Beck
Anna Weidenholzer
was born in 1984 in Linz and now lives
in Vienna. She studied Comparative
Literature in Vienna and Wroclaw,
Poland. Weidenholzer has been
published numerous times in literary
magazines and anthologies and has
won many awards, such as the Alfred-
Gesswein-Prize (2009), the Residency
Stipend at the Schloss Wiepersdorf
(2011), the State Grant for Literature
(2011/2012), Stadtschreiberin of
Kitzbühel (2012) and the Reinhard-
Priessnitz-Prize (2013). Her debut novel
Der Platz des Hundes (2010) earned
her a nomination for the European
Festival of the Debut Novel in Kiel in
2011. Her novel Der Winter tut den
Fischen gut was nominated in the
fiction category of the Leipzig Book
Fair Prize in 2013.
Previous works:
Der Platz des Hundes (2010)
Translation rights available from:
Residenz Verlag
Gutenbergstr. 12, 3100
St. Pölten, Austria
Contact: Renate Anderle
Tel: 0043/2742/802-1411
Email: r.anderle@residenzverlag.at
www.residenzverlag.at
‘Anna Weidenholzer draws an arc of
psychological suspense, painting a
convincing picture of the narrow world
of so many marginalised people.’
– Der Standard, Klaus Zeyringer
A sample translation of this title
is available on the NBG website
Residenz Verlag
was founded in 1956 in Salzburg.
Early publishing lists concentrated on
fine art and non-fiction titles. During
the 1960s a fiction list was added, and
leading Austrian authors including H.C.
Artmann, Thomas Bernhard, Barbara
Frischmuth and Peter Handke published
their first work here. German and
Swiss writers were gradually included,
followed in the 1980s by international
authors in translation. The non-fiction
list includes books on contemporary
history as well as monographs of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century
artists and books on music, theatre
and architecture. Since 2001 the
Residenz Verlag has been publishing
literary and artistic picture books and
fiction for young readers, too, in the
Nilpferd imprint.
Fiction 17

New German-Language
Literature Prize
The Friedrich Ulfers Prize is
Deutsches Haus NYU & Festival
Neue Literatur’s testimony to the
rising importance of Germanlanguage
literature in America.
The prize will be awarded in
conjunction with the opening of
the festival each February, and will
go to a leading publisher, writer,
critic, translator or scholar who
has championed the advancement
of German-language literature in
the United States. The prize will be
awarded annually by Deutsches
Haus NYU and the winner will be
selected by a committee comprised
of the organisations which host
Festival Neue Literatur each year.
The prize is made possible by
Professor Friedrich Ulfers, Associate
Professor of German at New York
University. In the past he has
served as Assistant Dean of the
College of Arts and Science, the
German Department’s Director of
Undergraduate Studies, Director
of the NYU in Berlin Summer, and
Director of Deutsches Haus NYU.
He has taught not only in the
German Department, but also in
NYU’s interdisciplinary programs,
offering courses that engage a
range of interests, including literary
theory, continental philosophy, and
the relationships between science,
literature and philosophy.
The first recipient of the Friedrich
Ulfers Prize was Carol Brown
Janeway, a translator, author and
senior executive at Alfred A. Knopf.
She has published a large selection
of German books for American
readers, many of which she
translated herself. The list includes
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink,
Measuring the World and Fame
by Daniel Kehlmann, Perfume by
Patrick Süskind, Guilt by Ferdinand
von Schirach, among others.
Martin Rauchbauer, the current
Director of Deutsches Haus NYU,
was delighted that Janeway
was chosen, commenting that
her ‘legendary translations and
publications of writers such as
18 News and INFORMation
From left to right: Martin Rauchbauer, Director, Deutsches Haus NYU, Carol Brown
Janeway, Friedrich Ulfers, Daniel Kehlmann
Bernhard Schlink, Daniel Kehlmann,
and Thomas Bernhard show how
a single person can shape the
perception of contemporary
German-language literature in an
entire country,’ giving some insight
into the lengths to which she has
gone to promote German literature
in the US.
At the opening reception for the
Festival Neue Literatur 2013, which
was held at the Goethe-Institut
New York’s SoHo office, Janeway
was presented with a certificate
signed by Professor Ulfers, a
beautifully cut trophy sponsored
by Swarovski Gems, and a $5,000
cash prize sponsored by Deutsches
Haus NYU and Professor Ulfers.
Daniel Kehlmann, two of whose
books Janeway has translated,
gave a moving laudatio in her
honor, and introduced her to the
crowd by saying, ‘Some of us,
those who neither write nor work
in publishing, might not know
it: Carol Brown Janeway is first
and foremost a publisher. She
translates for her own – and our –
pleasure. She translates on the side
and for recreation, translating is
how she spends her holidays.’
He also praised her for the fact
that ‘she creates a voice, which
is close to the author’s original
voice, but is an English version
of it, something not equal, but
equivalent.’ Janeway aims to
preserve the feel of an author’s
book through translation, instead
of trying to remind readers that
they are reading something
that was first written in another
language. Kehlmann emphasised
this point by stating that ‘when it
comes to translation theory, Carol
is a dilettante, she is just incapable
of understanding why it should
be good for a writer to become
unreadable in the process.’ He
stressed the difference between
what he called an ‘academic
translator’ and Janeway, saying
that academic translators are
encouraged to maintain the
syntax of the original language,
whereas Janeway aims to maintain
the content and voice of the
original language.
He praised her ability to create
something that is truly collaborative
by ‘invent[ing] her own sentences
alongside the writer’s sentences,’
which is part of her effort to create
an ‘English version’ of the author’s
voice. He also spoke about
Janeway’s willingness to tackle a
challenge: a chapter of his book
© Isabelle Duverger
Fame included a ‘skaz-language’
that he created in the novel,
which he said he thought could be
translated into pretty much any
language except English, but he
was able to convince Janeway to
create an English equivalent of the
‘internet nerd chapter,’ which was
filled with ‘her own ideas and jokes.’
Janeway spoke at the reception
as well, mentioning that the first
author she acquired was a German
author, Lothar-Günther Buchheim,
who wrote Das Boot. The book
went on to be a bestseller and was
made into a film. In fact, several
of Janeway’s books – be they
translations of hers or books she
has acquired – have been made
into films, including The Reader
and Perfume.
The evening was a celebration of
translation and of the beginning
of yet another wonderful Festival
Neue Literatur. There were
over 150 publishing and media
professionals in attendance at
the reception, and there was
lively conversation preceding
and following the speeches.
The 2014 winner of the Friedrich
Ulfers Prize will be announced at
the opening reception of the fifth
annual Festival Neue Literatur in
late February 2014.
By Grace Moss, German Book
Office New York
Daniel Kehlmann presents his laudatio to the audience at the Festival Neue Literatur
opening reception
© Gudron Olthoff

Juli Zeh –
Fighting the Tide
Dear Goethe-University of Frankfurt
Many thanks for your letter. It’s an honour to be offered your annual
guest lectureship in literary poetics. Unfortunately I shall have to decline.
In 2013 I will be fully occupied with the writing of several novels, plays,
essays, scripts, e-mails, tax returns, diary entries and shopping lists.
Consequently I won’t have time to prepare a lecture series on poetics.
Sincerely
Juli Zeh
Writers who talk about their writing
stop being writers and become
readers of their work – writes
Juli Zeh in Treideln (Schöffling,
June 2013). The book, from which
Zeh read aloud over the course
of this year’s Frankfurt lectures, is
composed of a series of letters and
other communications, beginning
with a note to Frankfurt University,
turning down the invitation
to lecture. Through letters and
emails to academics – and to
some curiously named friends and
other correspondents, including
Zeh’s publisher, the local council,
journalists and the tax authorities
– the book explains why writers
should never be trusted to explain
the process, or outcome, of writing.
I remember only too well those
mornings in German grammar
schools, the pupils flocked there by
decree for me to be wheeled out
in front of them, living proof that
contemporary literature exists.
Writers, protests the writer of the
letter, don’t have intentions. What
does the writer want to tell us?
Nothing! Writers can either write
– or theorise about writing. A novel
isn’t planned like an expedition. It
starts with a situation, a feeling, a
coincidence – or so the letter-writer
says. And from situations, feelings
or coincidences, the contours of a
protagonist may emerge…
Early forties, living – where else?
– in Berlin. Long-term lodger in
the infinitely expandable transition
phase between university and
career. An expert in the art of
refusing to grow into the world of
wage-earners, family-founders and
home-builders. A representative
of extended puberty beyond the
big 40. In short, the essence of a
twenty-first-century urban man.
Sneakers, stubble […] Wolfgang
Treidel? Or Karl?
Clearly, as the letter-writers –
variously, Juli Zeh, J.Z., Frau Zeh,
Juliette – keep insisting, writers
can’t be trusted to talk about
their work. Ostensibly a series
of anti-poetics lectures about
the futility of writers explaining
writing, Treideln is all about
As of spring 2014, four of Juli Zeh’s titles will be available in English.
how writing happens, from the
sudden birth of a forty-something
protagonist to a long-standing
preference, instilled by Balzac,
Musil and Mann, for third-person
narratives. Accompanying and
illustrating these reflections on
authorial intentions are extracts,
or readings, from novels – Zeh’s
debut, Eagles and Angels, which
she rewrote halfway through
from the perspective of its
protagonist; Spieltrieb, a novel
about the ‘great-grandchildren’
of the nihilists, recounted with
metaphorical flourishes and
narratorial interjections – a
challenge to Zeh’s tutors at the
creative writing institute in Leipzig
who ruled that contemporary
fiction should be personal in
perspective and plain in style;
then Dark Matter (for US readers,
In Free Fall), a metaphysical
detective story about God and
quantum physics that nearly
wasn’t written owing to an overly
detailed plan; and The Method,
a stage play that grew into a novel
about a society in which health is
the highest good.
Dear Herr Würmer
Welcome back to our
correspondence course on Political
Literature, which, in line with
the learning outcomes of our
last lesson, can now be renamed
Creative Works By Political
Individuals Who Happen to be
Writers and Sometimes Write Texts
That May Be Political But Aren’t
Necessarily So.
Zeh, who holds a doctorate in
international law, is known for
speaking out on political matters,
most recently in an open letter
challenging Angela Merkel over
Prism. Here the letter-writer notes
that precisely because fiction is
necessarily ambiguous, authors
who happen to be political
individuals will tend to choose
other formats in which to present
their political views – open letters,
newspaper articles, televised
statements and so forth. From
which it should not be assumed
that their fiction is also political or
even that literary works by political
individuals will always engage
with political themes. Indeed,
writers who happen to be political
individuals may choose to write
psychological thrillers about scubadiving
– like Nullzeit, Zeh’s most
recent novel.
Author Juli Zeh
No, I’m not a business. I’m not
a registered trader. I don’t have a
sideline in agriculture. Nor am I a
political party, a paramilitary unit,
or an allotment club. But I don’t
see why – unlike these and various
other organisations – I’m not
entitled to apply for a second blue
recycling bin. Sadly, experience
tells me that I don’t have to be
a multitude in order to pile up
avalanche-towers of paper. I can
do it on my own.
An excess of waste paper;
disputes with the tax authorities
over tax-deductible expenses
for which there are no receipts;
the difficulty of distinguishing
between prevarication and
needing more time. Treideln is
all about the practice of writing
and the practical problems of
writing. The title comes from our
protagonist, Karl Treidel, who
dies at the end of the book – an
inevitable consequence of a writer
talking about writing, or so the
anti-theoretical letter-writer says.
‘Treideln’, though, is also a German
verb that describes laborious
movement against the current.
What is the writer trying to tell us?
Evidently, readers can make of the
metaphor what they will.
Juli Zeh’s fifth novel, Nullzeit, will
be published in English in spring
2014 (Decompression, Harvill
Secker/Random House UK). Other
works available in English include
Eagles and Angels (Granta Books),
Dark Matter (Harvill Secker) and
The Method (Vintage).
Sally-Ann Spencer is currently
completing a PhD in German
literature at the University of
Victoria, Wellington, NZ.
ARTICLE 19
© David Finck

NBG Choices: Books in English
FICTIOn
Naw Much of a Talker
Pedro Lenz
Translated by Donal McLaughlin
Freight Books
‘Both hilarious and heartbreaking, this
novel is narrated by a former heroin addict.
Recently released from jail and determined
to start anew, he falls in love with a spokenfor
barmaid. Goalie (the narrator) may
have great stories to tell but isn’t much of
a talker when it comes to communicating.
“Lenz uses language so brilliantly,” wrote
one critic, “it sounds like a live broadcast
from real life.”’
– Donal McLaughlin, Translator
The Watcher
Charlotte Link
Translated by Stefan Tobler
Orion
‘Samson Segal, an unemployed thirtysomething,
has taken to spying on his
neighbours, particularly the beautiful
Gillian Ward. When Gillian’s daughter
comes home to an empty house, Samson
takes her in. Then Gillian’s husband is
found murdered, and Samson comes under
intense scrutiny. The only man making any
progress on the case should not really be
working on it. Yet he’s the only one who
believes Samson is innocent…’
– Laura Gerrard, Editor
Light in a Dark House
Jan Costin Wagner
Translated by Anthea Bell
Harvill Secker
‘An unidentified woman in a coma is
murdered, the killer’s tears staining her
sheets. Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa
is called in to identify the victim and catch
her killer in this haunting psychological
thriller. As autumn turns to winter, Kimmo’s
attempts to unravel the case and identify
the first victim are complicated by the
disappearance of his sometime girlfriend
and by a colleague’s spiral into the depths
of a gambling addiction.’
– Frances Gizauskas, Publicity Assistant,
Vintage
Back to Back
Julia Franck
Translated by Anthea Bell
Harvill Secker
‘A magnificent novel about a great love
from the prizewinning author of The Blind
Side of the Heart.
Thomas and Ella grow up with their
overpowering mother, a sculptress and
fervent believer in the socialist ideology of
East Germany. She barely acknowledges
Ella’s vulnerable loneliness and Thomas’
quiet aspirations. The siblings find
themselves enclosed when the Berlin Wall is
built, and must find their own paths within
their mother’s utopia.’
– Ellie Steel, Editor
Someday We’ll Tell Each
Other Everything
Daniela Krien
Translated by Jamie Bulloch
MacLehose Press
‘Summer 1990. The Wall has fallen and
Germany prepares for reunification. In the
sleepy countryside of the East, sixteen-yearold
Maria moves in with her boyfriend on
his family’s farm. An encounter with an
enigmatic older man ignites an improbable
affair, and keeping their passion a secret
becomes increasingly difficult. A powerful
love story on the one hand, on the other
a perceptive and subtle portrait of a
community in flux.’
– Katharina Bielenberg, Associate
Publisher
Almost Like Spring
Alex Capus
Translated by John Brownjohn
Haus
‘Two disaffected young men stultified by
the Great Depression in Germany become
bank robbers in Switzerland. On the run,
the humanity of these astutely drawn,
sympathetic characters is challengingly
juxtaposed against the cruelty of their
crimes. Like much of Capus’ work the tone
is droll and elegiac. The fourth of his books
we’ve published, Almost Like Spring is
arguably the most compelling.’
– Harry Hall, Associate Publisher
20 Article news and information

A selection of books in English translation recommended
for reviewers, booksellers, literary festivals and readers
NON-FICTION
Red Love: The Story of
an East German Family
Maxim Leo
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Pushkin Press
‘Growing up in East Berlin, Leo knew not to
ask questions. But now, with the Wall gone,
he wants the truth. What drove his parents
apart? Why did his father became so angry,
and his mother end her career in journalism?
Why did his grandfather become a stranger?
The story Leo unearths parallels his country’s
past; he captures, with warmth and honesty,
why the GDR failed as a dreamed-of new
world.’
– Gesche Ipsen, Editor
CHILDREN’S
Enemy of the Ants
Stephan Valentin
Translated by Moira Kerr
Pfefferkorn
‘Enemy of the Ants does not spare the
reader in its graphic depiction of a young
protagonist who is already displaying
pathologically violent behaviour. Jonas’
fierce, Oedipal love for his mother is
threatened by the imminent arrival of a
sibling and by a parade of “uncles” who
compete with him for her attention. In my
favourite scene, Jonas and his terrifying
grandmother have a disturbing but comic
night-time encounter “on” the toilet.’
– Chantal Wright, Editor
The Bible Hunter
Jürgen Gottschlich
Translated by John Brownjohn
Haus
‘Part history, part travelogue, part critique,
The Bible Hunter charts the quest of
academic and fundamentalist Constantin
von Tischendorf to find the oldest existing
copy of the Bible – and its discovery in a
remote monastery. Gottschlich describes
how the Bible as we know it came into
being, and follows the manuscript from
the Sinai desert to the British Library,
raising questions about how and where
ancient treasures should be stored.’
– Harry Hall, Associate Publisher
Memory
Christoph Marzi
Translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby
Orchard
‘Memory is a haunting and compelling
novel – written with a significant nod
to the traditional ghost story but with a
brilliant twenty-first century twist. The
relationship between Jude and Story sparks
off the page, and the thrilling twist will stay
with you long after you finish reading.’
– Jessica Clarke, Editor, Hachette
Children’s Books
ALSO RECOMMENDED
The White Cities:
Reports From France 1925-39
What I Saw:
Reports from Berlin 1920-33
Hotel Savoy
On the End of
the World
Joseph Roth
Translated by Michael Hofmann
Granta and Portobello
Joseph Roth
Translated by Michael Hofmann
Granta and Portobello
Joseph Roth
Translated by Jonathan Katz
Hesperus
Joseph Roth
Translated by Will Stone
Hesperus
news and information ARTICLE 21

Christoph W. Bauer
In einer Bar unter dem Meer
(In a Bar Under the Sea)
Haymon Verlag, August 2013, 232pp. ISBN: 978-3-7099-7088-1
The trials of life
Christoph Bauer is an acclaimed poet and novelist whose
latest literary venture is a collection of twenty short stories
with a quirky originality that seals his reputation as a
literary craftsman.
Bauer’s stories revisit the themes which he has handled so
masterfully in his poetry, focusing on particular instances
of loss, loneliness and frustration. They are infused with
melancholy and yet retain a lightly humorous touch which
adds to their charm. Bauer’s unfortunate characters find
themselves in familiar predicaments, but often respond in
unexpected ways. There is the overweight stamp collector
whose motivation for starting an extreme weight-loss
programme is to ensure he does not die before his mortgage
is paid off, a desperate lover who poses naked in public
in a bid to attract the attentions of his beloved, and a
hairdresser whose husband is addicted to online shopping.
Some characters recur in subsequent stories, generating
a pleasurable sense of recognition for the reader.
These striking tales are both subtle and brilliant, narrated
in a sharp prose which effortlessly navigates a wide range
of narrative styles. The reader is immediately drawn into
each story by its arresting opening, and remains hooked as
the plot unfolds. The remarkable title story takes place in
a slightly dystopian future and recounts an unconventional
betrayal. The protagonist is a straight-laced civil servant
who has not slept with his wife for two years and mourns
the loss of passion in his marriage. One Friday evening when
his wife has gone away for the weekend, he leaves his face
at work by mistake and decides to rent a different one.
In an outlet store for last season’s faces, he chooses an old
Ernest Hemingway model and observes how people react
to him in completely different ways. Breaking with his usual
routine he ends up in a bar where, to his absolute horror,
his wife appears. Not recognising her husband she begins
to try and seduce him, which is brilliantly framed as both
the best thing and the worst thing which could happen
to him. The story concludes with a clever twist which is
completely unexpected.
Christoph Bauer’s impeccably crafted short story collection
is a literary treat which will delight existing fans and ensure
that his impressive body of work finds new readers.
© Florian Schneider
Christoph W. Bauer
was born in 1968 in Carinthia and grew
up in Lienz, Eastern Tyrol and Kirchberg,
Tyrol. He lives and writes in Innsbruck
and has written lyric poetry, prose,
essays and audio plays (Und immer
wieder Cordoba, ORF 2006; Franzens
Feste, ORF 2010), and translations.
Previous works:
Selection: Im Alphabet der Häuser.
Roman einer Stadt (Haymon 2007);
Graubart Boulevard (Haymon 2008);
mein lieben mein hassen mein
mittendrin du. Gedichte (Haymon
2011); Die zweite Fremde. Zehn
Jüdische Lebensbilder (Haymon 2013)
Translation rights available from:
Haymon Verlag
Erlerstraße 10
A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Contact: Anna Stock
Tel: +43 512 576300 21
Email: anna.stock@haymonverlag.at
www.haymonverlag.at
Haymon Verlag
was established in 1982 by the
historian, journalist and author Michael
Forcher as a non-fiction publishing
company. The Haymon Verlag is named
after a giant named Haymon who,
according to an old legend, founded
the Stift Wilten monastery near
Innsbruck in the eighth century. It was
one of the first cultural centres in the
region that later became known as
the Tyrol. Since 1988, it has primarily
published German-language and
international literature. Haymon Verlag
has been a subsidiary company of the
Studienverlag since September 2004.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Austria (see page 40)
22 short stories

Ann Cotten
Der schaudernde Fächer
(The Quivering Fan)
Suhrkamp Verlag, October 2013, 251pp. ISBN: 978-3-518-42389-9
Deepest desires
The Quivering Fan is a collection of short stories which
blend philosophical reflections on the interconnectedness
of love, desire and art with spirited characters whose
openness and curiosity bring these themes to life.
Ann Cotten’s writing moves with hypnotic ease between
lighthearted topics and the consideration of fundamental
questions about how we inhabit the world. Her whirlwind
creativity encompasses music, sex and artistic ambition, via
reflections on embarrassment and the role of art in people’s
lives. Along the way she pauses to consider how someone’s
hair moves in the wind, to muse about the ways in which
conservative societies regulate the gaze, to look at garden
gates and to scrutinise the place of cats in the history of art.
Cotten generates new metaphors by the bucketful which
resonate with the reader long after each story has come
to an end.
Almost every story in The Quivering Fan is a love story
of sorts, but there is nothing conventional about them.
The seventeen short stories share the same young female
narrator who features alternately as the desirer, the object
of desire or the one refusing the pull of desire.
The story with which the volume opens, ‘The Bored Combo’,
demonstrates Cotten’s immense creative energy: the
narrator is listening to music, while working in a library
and thinking about music and what makes people work
and work well. She finds a way of comparing the way music
moves you, whether you want it or not, with the way a
man or woman moves you, whether you want it or not.
Reflections on the affective power of music are interwoven
throughout the book.
Cotten portrays desire as the single most driving, elusive
and vexing experience in our lives. Each story has its own
take on desire, narrating a single transitory moment in
the narrator’s relationship with another man or woman.
In ‘The Green Peacock’ two women compare notes on
how they were attracted to men that they had either no
good reason to like or felt compelled to like against their
better judgment. In ‘Death’s Stupid Brother’ the narrator
unexpectedly embarks upon a lesbian one-night stand
while simultaneously investigating her philosophy of love.
Ann Cotten’s latest work is intelligent and unusual,
achieving the feat of being genuinely daring without
the need to shock.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
© Suhrkamp Verlag
Ann Cotten
was born in 1982 in Iowa and moved
to Vienna in 1987, and Berlin in 2006.
She studied German and wrote her
thesis on Concrete Poetry. She made
her literary debut in 2007 with her
book Fremdwörterbuchsonette, for
which she was awarded the Reinhard-
Priessnitz Prize. In 2008 she received
the George-Saiko-Reisetipendium
and the Clemens Brentano Prize for
Literature in the city of Heidelberg.
Previous works:
Fremdwörterbuchsonette (2007);
Florida-Räume (2010)
Translation rights available from:
Suhrkamp Verlag
Pappelallee 78-79
10437 Berlin, Germany
Contact: Nora Mercurio
Tel: +49 30 740744 231
Email: mercurio@suhrkamp.de
www.suhrkamp.de/foreign_rights_462.
html
Suhrkamp Verlag
was founded in 1950 by Peter
Suhrkamp and directed for over forty
years by Dr. Siegfried Unseld. The
independent publishing company
now includes Insel Verlag (founded in
Leipzig in 1899), the Jüdischer Verlag
(founded in Berlin in 1902), as well
as the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag
(established in 1981) and the newly
founded Verlag der Weltreligionen
(established in 2006). Suhrkamp
focuses on both contemporary
literature and the humanities. Its
distinguished list includes leading
writers from Germany, Switzerland
and Austria, many of whom made
their debuts with the firm, besides
major international authors of both
fiction and non-fiction, including
several Nobel Prize winners.
short stories 23

Andrea Gerster
Ganz oben
(Flying High)
Lenos Verlag, February 2013, 163 pp. ISBN: 978-3-85787-435-2
A discerning whodunit
Flying High is an absorbing and accessible psychological
study in self-deception and an exploration of the power
of the imagination to construct its own reality.
Olivier Kamm – a highly successful forensic pathologist
whose career is going from strength to strength – is
rehearsing his defence before an imaginary court. He
presumes he is confined in some kind of cell. His head is
shaved bald. He doesn’t know where he is, why he is there,
or what he is accused of. But Kamm assumes he is awaiting
trial for some unspecified offence, like that other more
celebrated K. of Kafka’s The Trial. We gradually learn about
his life and the events that have led to this point in a multistranded
narrative interspersed with Kamm’s own musings
on his situation and state of mind. We are also treated to
the speeches that Kamm imagines himself addressing to
the court in his defence when his case comes to trial.
Gerster masterfully interweaves the various plot strands
of Flying High, before finally bringing them together in a
satisfying denouement. Kamm undertakes harrowing work
on a police investigation into online child pornography and
then goes on holiday to try and recover. His affair with
a married woman during this holiday is contrasted with a
previous relationship with a girl called Maila, a free spirit
he met in a bar. The stories of the two women intersect
at one point, when they both meet by accident at Kamm’s
apartment. While on holiday with Kamm in the Dominican
Republic, Maila ends up dead, her body washed ashore in
the resort where they are staying. The verdict is suicide but
it later emerges that the two of them had had a serious
quarrel before Maila’s death. There follows a trip to Thailand
to visit his ailing father, a motorcycle accident, a kidnapping
and an attempted fraud. When it is revealed that mysterious
marks have been found on Maila’s neck Kamm hopes to be
able to use his pathological expertise to explain them away
in court. Kamm’s anxiety about the impression his story is
making on the imaginary court contributes to the novel’s
tense and expectant atmosphere.
The truth remains tantalisingly elusive in Gerster’s
suspenseful thriller, but as fans of crime fiction know,
much of the reading pleasure lies in the detective work
along the way.
© Oriana Gerster
Andrea Gerster
was born in 1959 and works as a
freelance journalist and author in
Eastern Switzerland. She has published
three novels, three collections of short
stories and stories in literary magazines
and anthologies which have won
numerous prizes.
Previous works:
Käfermanns Liebe (2004);
Dazwischen Lili (2008); Mimosa fliegt
(2009); Schandbriefe (2010)
Translation rights available from:
Lenos Verlag
Spalentorweg 12
Postfach
4003 Basel, Switzerland
Contact: Christoph Blum
Tel: +41 61 2613414
Email: lenos@lenos.ch
www.lenos.ch
Lenos Verlag
was founded in 1970 and is one of
the most well-established publishing
houses in Switzerland. Their programme
has been shaped by Swiss literature,
Arab literature and contemporary
non-fiction.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Switzerland (see page 40)
24 Crime fiction

Judith W. Taschler
Die Deutschlehrerin
(The German Teacher)
Picus Verlag, February 2013, 224pp. ISBN: 978-3-85452-692-6
A punchy psychological drama
Judith W. Taschler’s novel is both a tantalising love story and
the dark and unsettling mystery of a young child’s abduction.
Xaver Sand and Mathilda Kaminski have a fourteen-year
relationship during which Xaver becomes a highly successful
writer and Mathilda dedicates herself to her career as a
teacher. Baby-hungry Mathilda is desperate to start a family
but Xaver resists and they remain childless. Xaver’s career
takes off with a trilogy for younger readers, based on an
idea by Mathilda herself. When Xaver walks out on Mathilda
without any explanation her dreams of having children are
shattered. Her devastation is complete when she learns from
a casual glance at a celebrity magazine that he has quickly
married into a wealthy family and is expecting a baby with
his new wife. It is again through the press that she finds
out that Xaver’s young child has been abducted, apparently
taken from his buggy in the garden and never found.
Taschler’s novel opens sixteen years after the end of their
relationship as Xaver and Mathilda are corresponding by
email about a creative writing project for her pupils. The
reader enjoys their sudden realisation that they know each
other and the suspense in the run up to their first meeting.
By the time Mathilda confronts Xaver about his reaction to
his child’s disappearance it is clear to the reader that things
are more complicated than they seem. What had been an
entertaining romantic comedy gives way to a darker but
equally absorbing mood.
The reader is encouraged to believe that Mathilda’s jealousy
of Xaver’s new family may have led her to kidnap the
boy, until Xaver confesses his dual culpability in the boy’s
disappearance – he was having sex with his son’s au pair
while the child was left unattended, and he had failed to
replace the protective cover on the methane plant in their
garden. At times we cannot be sure who is telling the truth,
but the pieces of the jigsaw finally fall into place with a
series of narrative shocks for the reader. Eventually, through
Mathilda’s persuasive talks with Xaver, the case is reopened
and Xaver is taken into custody.
The German Teacher takes readers on an emotive journey
into the lives of its intriguing characters with laughter, tears
and drama along the way. This is an ingeniously constructed
novel which is just as enjoyable for its romantic elements as
for its story of an unsolved crime.
© Julia Türtscher
Judith W. Taschler
was born in 1970 in Linz and grew
up in the Mühlviertel district. Taschler
travelled abroad, working in different
jobs, and studied German and history.
She lives in Innsbruck with her family
and works as a teacher and freelance
author. She has written screenplays and
her first novel Sommer wie Winter
was published by Picus in 2011.
Previous works:
Sommer wie Winter (2011)
Translation rights available from:
Picus Verlag
Friedrich-Schmidt-Platz 4
1080 Vienna, Austria
Contact: Barbara Giller
Tel: +43-1-408 1821
Email: giller@picus.at
www.picus.at
Picus Verlag
is an independent publishing house
in Vienna. The publishing programme
concentrates on travelogues and
promising Austrian and German
writers – literary fiction as well as
children’s books. Its list also comprises
contemporary history, memoirs and
essays. Among its authors are Thomas
Sautner, Egyd Gstättner, Marlene Faro,
Sylvie Schenk, Franzobel and
Rudolf Habringer.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Austria (see page 40)
Crime fiction 25

Writer-in-Residence Programmes in the UK
Writer-in-residence
programmes are a great
opportunity for university
departments and cultural
centres to allow their patrons
to discover upcoming German,
Swiss and Austrian writers. For
the authors, these programmes
offer a unique chance to further
develop their craft and to
engage with new audiences in
fresh surroundings. It might be
reasonable to assume that such
programmes have been under
financial pressure and strain
in recent years. But, in spite
of funding and budgets being
increasingly subject to scrutiny,
writer-in-residence programmes
continue to prosper and thrive.
This is the case not only for
regular programmes that have
been in place for many years,
but also for new and irregular
programmes that have come
about through collaboration
between institutions.
Funding and Support
Many of the writer-in-residence
programmes that run throughout
the UK receive assistance from
cultural institutions or funding
bodies such as the German
Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD). The DAAD scheme offers
German departments in British
universities the opportunity to
invite German authors for a period
of two to four weeks, allowing
authors and students to engage
with one another in seminars,
discussions and readings. Through
the funding assistance provided
by the DAAD, writers such as
Elke Erb, Robert Gerhardt and
José F. A. Oliver have visited
the University of Warwick, and
both Jan Brandt and last year’s
Büchner Prize Winner Felicitas
Hoppe were hosted by King’s
College London. Aston University’s
writer-in-residence programme
is as strong as ever thanks to
continued support, with its German
department having invited writers
to the university since the early
1990s. In recent years authors
such as Lorenz Schröter and Jörg
Albrecht have allowed Aston’s
students to engage with their
works and the creative process.
The Swiss Arts Council, Pro Helvetia,
similarly contributes to the cultural
26 article
Dr Lyn Marven introduces an event organised by the University of Liverpool with
writer-in-residence Larissa Boehning and writer Zoe Lambert
outreach of Swiss writers by
assisting British universities to
host Swiss writers-in-residence.
The University of Leeds is a recent
beneficiary of Pro Helvetia’s
scheme, having received support
for the visit of Christian Kracht.
Collaboration
The funding that the DAAD
provides for short-term residencies
of between two and four weeks
has resulted in many German
departments collaborating to invite
authors. Indeed, the DAAD actively
encourages this collaboration
between universities and cultural
organisations in the form of joint
applications and co-operation.
These joint applications are of
great value to many universities
without a regular writer-inresidence
in place, as it allows
them the opportunity to experience
the benefits of such residencies.
Collaboration between the
University of Liverpool and the
University of Lancaster has enabled
visits by writers such as Maike
Wetzel and Larissa Boehning, and
this year both universities, along
with the Universities of Sheffield,
Leeds and Manchester, have
secured funding to invite journalist
and author Holger Ehling. The
DAAD is also supporting the
academic and poet Jörg Bernig’s
residencies at the Universities of
Swansea, Cardiff and Bath later
this year. These collaborative
projects not only serve to foster
long-term relationships between
the university departments, but
also pave the way for more
multiple residencies in the future,
allowing authors to engage with
a much wider audience than longterm
residencies. The recent tour
of Alois Hotschnig, arranged by
the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for
Austrian Literature, allowed him to
engage with audiences in Leeds,
London, Oxford and Bristol within
a very short space of time.
Other forms of collaboration
also help to create residency
opportunities. Durham University’s
enthusiastic involvement with
cultural events resulting from
the town-twinning arrangement
that exists between Durham and
Tübingen has resulted in the
poet Uwe Kolbe being a frequent
welcome visitor to the university.
Similarly, the University of Glasgow
profits from visiting writers and
events held at the Goethe-Institut
in Glasgow. For the last two years,
with the financial assistance of the
Ingeborg Bachmann Centre, the
University of Kent has arranged
events with writers who have been
guests of the Austrian Cultural
Forum. This year Arno Geiger
conducted a translation workshop
and a reading, and there is every
hope that the partnership between
the two institutions will continue
further into the future.
Zwei Wochen England
Aside from this collaboration
with the University of Kent, the
Ingeborg Bachmann Centre,
supported by the Austrian Cultural
Forum, continues to provide a
writer-in-residence programme
for Austrian writers to stay and
work in London for two weeks; in
2014, the writer-in-residence will
be Eva Menasse. The programme,
established in 2002, has enjoyed a
wealth of contemporary Austrian
writers in recent years, such as
Lilian Faschinger, Walter Grond,
Erich Wolfgang Skwara, Anna Kim,
© The Bluecoat, Liverpool
Evelyn Schlag and Lydia
Mischkulnig.
In order to showcase the literary
talent of the writers-in-residence
hosted by the Ingeborg Bachmann
Centre during its first ten years,
the Centre’s Director Dr Heide
Kunzelmann decided to edit a
collection of poetry and prose
entitled Zwei Wochen England,
consisting of writings inspired by
the writers’ stay in London. After
inviting previous and current
writers-in-residence to contribute
to the book, Dr Kunzelmann was
delighted that all eleven authors
agreed to do so, resulting in a
bi-lingual edition of these works
being published by Sonderzahl
in the autumn of last year. The
inspiration for the project was that
the list of writers invited by the
Ingeborg Bachmann Centre in the
programme’s first ten years was,
as Dr Kunzelmann noticed, ‘a kind
of who’s who of Austrian literature
around the turn of the twenty-first
century.’ The book was launched
in November 2012 at the Austrian
Cultural Forum and received a
mention in Austrian magazine
Profil in a feature on Austrian
literature in Great Britain in June
of this year.
The blurb for Zwei Wochen
England declares that it seeks to
be a bridge between the cultures
of ‘Island’ and ‘Continent.’ The
collaborative work between
university departments, cultural
centres and schemes helps develop
writer-in-residence programmes
and ensures that this bridge is
being ever-strengthened.
By Andrew Hayden

© Thorsten Greve
Writer and translator Klaus Böldl,
soon to be writer-in-residence at
Aston University
Further Upcoming
Residencies
n In October, Aston University
will welcome Klaus Böldl
whose work as both a
writer and translator will
undoubtedly provide great
insight for those interested
in literary translation. Aston
will be also be hosting a
one-day colloquium with
a keynote speech by the
eminent literary critic and
poet Heinrich Dietering.
n Queen Mary University of
London is hosting Gregor
Sander for the spring
and autumn of 2013. The
University is also hoping
to bring together previous
writers-in-residence at
an anniversary festival
tentatively planned
for 2015.
n The University of Leeds
has recently launched the
International Writers at
Leeds Programme. Although
not specific to Germanlanguage
writers, Swiss
novelist and journalist
Christian Kracht launched
the programme during
his two-day visit to the
university and held seminars
and conducted readings
of his work.
n This year Kristof Magnusson,
Holger Ehling and Jörg
Bernig are visiting a number
of institutions throughout
the autumn and winter.
An extract from Klaus Böldl’s Der nächtliche Lehrer
And then there was Elisabeth
whom he had already noticed a
few days after moving to Sandvika.
She worked in the city library, a
flat-roofed building with large
windows situated in the middle of
the area by the lakeside and built
only recently, apparently. Elisabeth
sat bolt upright behind the loans
desk the whole time, carrying out
the same, routine movements
with her anything but graceful
or delicate small hands while she
worked, booking out loans and
putting returned books onto a
trolley next to her.
On his first visit to the library
Lennart had spent nearly two
hours looking through a set of
shelves in her direction again
and again, in the hope she would
finally stand up for once and come
out from behind her desk so that
he could see her whole figure. He
had hoped she would have small
feet: he liked women with small
feet. However, on that Thursday
afternoon the young librarian with
the brown, shoulder-length hair
had remained patiently sitting at
her desk the whole time.
Later, as Lennart was walking
home along the shores of the lake,
a cool drizzle started to fall; the
ducks had fluffed up their feathers
and were sitting motionless on the
grass. Looking back he saw the
windows brightly lit up by strip
lights between the trees in the
rain-washed dusk. The chain of
hills on the other side of the lake
was no longer visible. The surface
of the water was now the colour
of fresh tarmac. Out on the lake
crests of foam kept lighting up in
random, unexpected places, only
to disappear again in a flash, like
spots in front of your eyes. The
waves lapped quietly as they rolled
over the gravel towards the shore.
Isolated gusts of wind tore leaves
from the birch trees, blowing them
far out onto the water.
At this moment it seemed to
Lennart that it was the almost
inconceivable, Madonna-esque
motionlessness of the young lady
under the strip lighting, which he
had found most touching. She had
evoked a great sense of constancy,
as if she was sitting at her desk in
an old masterpiece. That night in
his still virtually empty bedroom
Lennart dreamt that the body of
the young librarian ended in a
scaly fish tail which shimmered
like metal but felt very warm,
as if made out of silk.
However, the very next day he
plucked up the courage to speak
to Elisabeth and ask her where to
find picture books on art.
‘You must be the new art teacher
at the grammar school,’ said
Elisabeth.
‘You would think the art teacher
is the most important man in
Sandvika, after the mayor and
the priest.’ Lennart laughed.
‘We have a small side room for the
art books. It’s just over there, at
the front near the cloakroom.’
By the following Saturday
afternoon they had already got as
far as going for a walk together,
Elisabeth on legs that he found
quite beautiful. Lennart in his
bottle-green suit, Elisabeth in a
blue woollen dress over which
she wore a raincoat. They strolled
a little too hurriedly through the
area by the lakeside, which was
quite crowded despite the overcast
sky and where bumblebees were
circling above the now withered
flower borders. They went on
under birch, alder and willow trees,
further and further along by the
lake beyond the edge of the town
where they were the only people
out walking and tall, tangled
undergrowth studded with purple
and yellow flowers blocked the
way to the lake.
It struck Lennart that Elisabeth
often thought long and hard
before saying anything and then
uttered sentences that sounded
as if she was reading them or had
learnt them by heart. Perhaps,
thought Lennart, she only did so
with him because he was from
the capital.
The wooded chain of hills on the
other side of the lake stretched
further, with quite a bare stony
ridge where only patches of
yellowish-green grass seemed to
be growing between flat rocks of
granite. Elisabeth told him that it
was the view of the town from up
there that had forever confused
her feelings for the town where
she was born.
‘Although I could not imagine
living anywhere else, I no longer
feel really at home here either,
since the clear winter’s day when
it didn’t snow and I stood up
there and only a vaguely outlined,
lighter patch shimmered where I
suspected my home town was.’
Lennart nodded. He knew what
it was like when places lost their
familiarity forever, becoming
strange from one day to the
next. Often, just like that, simply
because, for once, you had really
looked at them. He knew that
you could get hopelessly lost in a
region you used to know like the
back of your hand, where all the
places you want to get to have
disappeared. And that, equally,
places you had never seen before
could feel eerily like home the
moment you saw them.
‘You never really know where
you are.’
‘I always thought I did know.
At home,’ she said.
‘Not feeling at home anywhere
can also be enjoyable.’
‘For a while perhaps.’
After that they did not say
anything for some time. They
continued walking side by side
until Lennart felt a longing to see
Elisabeth’s face from the front.
Perhaps it was her small nose and
narrow mouth which made her
face look so peculiarly large and
a little foreign, this face in which
there would have been enough
room for at least one more pair
of eyes. However, Lennart liked
this face. Yes, he did, he firmly
believed in it. All he wanted was
to have this kind of face around
him forever. He said this much
to Elisabeth sometime later that
evening in a restaurant by the lake
where they ate trout, listening
to the gulls screeching in the
darkness outside and ordering
more and more white wine. By the
end of the evening they were both
a little drunk. On the long walk
to Lennart’s flat Elisabeth swung
her handbag in stubborn silence
the whole time, like a boisterous
child, and then lost her shoe on the
stairwell, sending it rolling down
an entire flight of stairs.
From Der nächtliche Lehrer
by Klaus Böldl.
Translated by Jean Darvill.
© S. Fischer Verlag GmbH,
Frankfurt am Main, 2010.
ARTICLE 27

Tamara Bach
Marienbilder
(Marian Images)
Carlsen Verlag, February 2014, 176pp. ISBN: 978-3-551-58299-7
Parallel lives
Marian Images shares the thematic concerns and dramatic
appeal of the popular British-American romantic comedy
Sliding Doors, framed by scenarios which will resonate with
young adult readers.
Mareike’s mother Magda disappears on a Thursday. From
the outset sixteen-year-old Mareike is sure that her mother
will not be coming back. Her father Günther is numb and
unemotional and as no one in the family seems to have
any idea what to do they simply keep things quiet and
carry on as normal. In its quest for the truth about Magda’s
disappearance, Marian Images tempts the reader with an
array of simultaneous narrative possibilities.
The emptiness which Magda leaves behind has a profound
effect on everyday life. School, work and friendships all lose
their charm. Mareike is haunted by the likelihood that her
mother’s disappearance was carefully planned, suggested by
the fact that Magda’s car was left at the station and that her
bank account was empty. In her loneliness Mareike begins to
reinvent and retell the story of how her parents met and the
kind of people they are. She imagines different versions of
what happened on the day her mother left, experimenting
with a range of possibilities that are interwoven with
the perspectives of the various family members, and yet
the truth remains out of reach.
Mareike’s early sexual experiences are narrated in
parallel with the story of her mother’s first love. When
Magda becomes pregnant at the age of eighteen it is
a source of huge shame to her family and she is hastily
married to Günther, who is not the baby’s father. Meanwhile
Mareike’s periods have stopped and it is possible that she
too is pregnant. In one version of the story Mareike has a
miscarriage, whereas in another she moves to a quiet
village by the sea and has her child there. There are also
several imagined reencounters between Mareike and her
mother, although it seems likely that any reconciliation
after Magda’s devastating act of abandonment will only
ever be provisional.
Tamara Bach’s exciting new book offers an unusual take on
universal themes of love and loss and is perfectly tailored
for teen readers. Its sensual imagery and evocative language
ensure that the characters in this rich novel are vividly
brought to life within each fascinating shift of their stories.
© Carlsen Verlag GmbH
Tamara Bach
was born in 1976 and studied to be a
teacher. Her first book Marsmädchen
was awarded the Oldenburger
Children’s and Young Adult Award, and
she also received the German Youth
Literature Award for it in 2004. Today,
Bach lives and writes in Berlin.
Previous works:
was vom sommer übrig ist (2012)
Translation rights available from:
Carlsen Verlag GmbH
Völckersstr. 14-20
22765 Hamburg, Germany
Contact: Daniela Steiner
Tel: +49 40 39804 269
Email: daniela.steiner@carlsen.de
www.carlsen.de/rights
Carlsen Verlag
was founded in 1953 as a subsidiary
of the Danish company Carlsen,
Copenhagen, so that its series for
younger children could be published
in German translation. Carlsen Verlag
Hamburg has been publishing its own
titles since 1964, ranging from picture
books for younger children to novels
for young adults. Educational series
include both fiction and non-fiction
for kindergarten and primary school
levels. Carlsen Comics was the first
to introduce comic books to the
German market.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
28 children AND Young Adults’

Finn-Ole Heinrich / Rán Flygenring
Die erstaunlichen Abenteuer der Maulina
Schmitt – Mein kaputtes Königreich
(The Amazing and Astonishing Adventures of Maulina Schmitt Part 1: My Shattered Kingdom)
Hanser Verlag, July 2013, 176pp. ISBN: 978-3-446-24304-0
Unhappily ever after
My Shattered Kingdom is a hard-hitting, wittily narrated
story with quirky illustrations that are seamlessly integrated
into the text.
Twelve-year-old Paulina’s world falls apart when her mum
announces that she has split up with Paulina’s dad and that
they are moving out of the family home. The only home
Paulina has ever known is a great, spacious, messy fourth
floor apartment. Every inch of space is chaotically filled
with sofas and plants; there are paintings under the tables
and newspapers everywhere. It has a creaky wooden floor,
a dark, scary attic and a shared garden with a secret den.
Her home was her kingdom, her parents her subjects, and
it is impossible for Paulina to imagine her life being any
other way.
Paulina is sassy, funny, clever, very outspoken and given to
complaining loudly if there is something she doesn’t like.
She assumes that it must be her dad’s fault that her parents
are splitting up and refuses to speak to him anymore.
Paulina and her mum move into a small terraced house that
feels as if it is made of plastic. The garden is tiny and the
walls are covered in funny plastic handles. Paulina hates
the new home and misses her friends. Her only solace is
her wonderfully eccentric grandad who now lives closer to
her. He doesn’t know what is going on between her parents
either, but he listens and shares his life’s stories and worldly
wisdoms with Paulina.
At school, she decides not to make any friends – the only
person who talks to her is tall, gangly Paul, with large,
yellow teeth and a smile that looks as if the sun was coming
up. It is Paul who explains to Paulina what all the handles
in the house are for: it is a disabled-access home. Now the
whole design makes sense, but Paulina is worried that they
are taking a space that someone else might need. Her mum
breaks the news that she has been diagnosed with an illness
that will soon make her lose the use of her legs and arms.
She needed an accessible home and decided to separate
from her husband to avoid burdening him with the role of
being her carer. Paulina is deeply shocked but falls back
on her considerable inner resources to cope with the huge
changes ahead. Young readers can look forward to following
Paulina’s progress in the planned sequel to this profoundly
moving story.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
© Schirin Moaiyeri
Finn-Ole Heinrich
was born near Hamburg in 1982 and
studied cinematography and fine art
in Hanover. He has been working as
a freelance author in Hamburg (and
frequently on trains) since 2009.
2011 saw the appearance of his first
children’s book, Frerk, du Zwerg!,
which was awarded the German Prize
for Young People’s Literature in 2012.
Rán Flygenring
was born in 1987 and spends most
of her time in Iceland. She studied
in Reykjavik, Basle and Berlin and
graduated from the Iceland Academy
of the Arts. She works as a graphic
designer and illustrator in Reykjavik
and worldwide. Rán also contributed
the illustrations to Frerk, du Zwerg!
Translation rights available from:
Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH&Co. KG
Foreign Rights Department | Hanser
Children’s Books
Vilshofenerstr. 10 D-81679 Munich,
Germany
Contact: Anne Brans
Tel: +49 89 99830 519
Email: anne.brans@hanser.de
www.hanser-literaturverlage.de
Carl Hanser Verlag
was established by its eponymous
owner in 1928 in Munich, and its
founder’s interests in both literature
and science have been maintained
to the present day. The firm publishes
fiction and non-fiction for both adults
and children. Its authors include
Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Jostein
Gaarder, Lars Gustafsson, Milan
Kundera, Harry Mulisch, Philip Roth,
Susan Sontag, Botho Strauß, Raoul
Schrott, Rafik Schami, Alfred Brendel,
Elke Heidenreich and ten Nobel Prize
winners, among them Elias Canetti,
whose works have been translated into
more than thirty different languages.
children AND Young Adults’ 29

Charlotte Inden
Anna und Anna
(The Two Annas)
Hanser Verlag, July 2013, 176pp. ISBN: 978-3-446-24172-5
A grandmother’s love
The Two Annas is a conversation in letters between a
grandmother and her granddaughter, as well as between
an elderly lady and her long-lost love, and between a young
girl and her first love. It is an affecting reflection on life and
love, family and relationships, loss and happiness.
Anna and her grandmother Anna have a special relationship;
their bond is closer and more intimate than their respective
mother-daughter relationships. Granddaughter Anna has
lost her best friend Jan who has moved to Amsterdam with
his mother. Grandmother Anna has lost one of her legs.
Encouraged by her granddaughter, she gets in touch with
the man she was in love with fifty years ago, Henri. Anna
and Anna write letters to each other, and to Jan and Henri.
There are letters to a leg, to Father Christmas and to their
family. Through these letters we get to know and like Anna
and Anna over the course of two or three years – Anna is
twelve when we meet her and fifteen at the end of the
book. We witness the ups and downs of first love as well
as the joys of finding love in old age. Both Annas are warm,
funny and sensitive; they share a sense of humour and a
fondness for wicked pirates.
Grandmother Anna goes on a world trip with Henri. Anna
and Jan meet and share first kisses although the distance
between the two countries and their teenage insecurities
keep them apart. When Grandmother Anna dies it comes
as a tremendous shock for both her granddaughter and the
reader. Granddaughter Anna starts to write first, tentative
letters to Henri, while Jan provides her with a shoulder
to cry on.
The Two Annas is an absolute treat to read. Readers of
all ages will delight in becoming acquainted with the two
Annas through the letters they write as well as through
the ones they receive. The young Anna writes lovely letters
for her age: playful yet also very insightful and down-toearth
– qualities which are reflected in her grandmother’s
thoughtful replies. Their letters are full of love and joie de
vivre and discuss subjects which readers can readily relate
to. The novel’s epistolary presentation of the relationship
between granddaughter and her grandmother is perfectly
executed while its exquisite design is a feast for the eyes:
no ebook could do this beautifully produced volume justice.
© Gustavo Alàbiso
Charlotte Inden
was born in 1979. She read German,
history of art, and cinema and
television studies in Marburg, London
and Strasbourg. She lives in Karlsruhe
with her husband, working as an editor
for a daily newspaper. Her message to
the world is: write more letters!
Translation rights available from:
Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH&Co. KG
Foreign Rights Department | Hanser
Children’s Books
Vilshofenerstr. 10 D-81679 Munich,
Germany
Contact: Anne Brans
Tel: +49 89 99830 519
Email: anne.brans@hanser.de
www.hanser-literaturverlage.de
Carl Hanser Verlag
was established by its eponymous
owner in 1928 in Munich, and its
founder’s interests in both literature
and science have been maintained
to the present day. The firm publishes
fiction and non-fiction for both adults
and children. Its authors include
Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Jostein
Gaarder, Lars Gustafsson, Milan
Kundera, Harry Mulisch, Philip Roth,
Susan Sontag, Botho Strauß, Raoul
Schrott, Rafik Schami, Alfred Brendel,
Elke Heidenreich and ten Nobel Prize
winners, among them Elias Canetti,
whose works have been translated into
more than thirty different languages.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
30 children AND Young Adults’

Johanna Rosen
Liberty Bell. Das Mädchen
aus den Wäldern
(Liberty Bell. The Girl from the Woods)
Arena Publishing, June 2013, 375pp. ISBN: 978-3-401-06804-6
A wild child
Johanna Rosen’s spectacular novel grips readers from start
to finish. She tells the extraordinary story of a teenage girl
who is discovered living wild in the forests of Oregon, USA
and her bewildering encounters with twenty-first century
urban life. The deeply disturbing mystery of the forest girl’s
parentage is unravelled in the course of a sequence of
dramatic revelations which have far-reaching implications
for the small-town community.
When seventeen-year-old Ronan Horace shows his friends
a video clip he has taken while out mountain-biking they
can hardly believe their eyes. The video shows a completely
naked girl running around in the forest and swimming in a
pond. It looks as if the girl might be living wild. The boys
insist upon seeing for themselves and Ronan leads them to
the isolated spot where he found the forest girl. They watch
the stark naked girl in amazement as she slaughters a small
animal and sings in an unintelligible voice. Is she mad? How
did she get there? Is she alone? Troubled rich kid Ernesto
Merrill is particularly moved by the girl and tries to talk to
her. She eventually tells him her name: Liberty Bell. Ernesto
ends up spending the night in Liberty Bell’s hut, knowing
that it is only a matter of time before the TV crews arrive.
The next day all hell breaks loose as police, medics and
journalists descend on the forest. Liberty Bell is bundled
into an ambulance and taken away to hospital. In the sterile
medical environment she seems a completely different
person to the tough forest girl. Ernesto refuses to give up on
Liberty Bell and returns to the hospital repeatedly. A tender
romance blossoms between them, fuelled by his sensitive
attempts to initiate her into modern life. While Ernesto’s
own dysfunctional family life is deteriorating, the search
begins for Liberty Bell’s parents, exposing an ugly story of
child abuse and exploitation. The story throws up many
possible suspects as candidates for Liberty Bell’s father so
that gradually almost all the inhabitants of the close-knit
community are implicated in the events, but keeps readers
guessing until its shocking and bloody conclusion.
Rosen captures the intensity and excitement of the boys’
discovery of the forest girl in immaculate prose. Her
suspense-laden exposure of the grimly fascinating and
decidedly murky history surrounding Liberty Bell’s birth
turns the novel into a true page-turner. This enthralling and
well-plotted story full of humorously engaging characters
is guaranteed to appeal to teen readers.
A sample translation of this title
is available on the NBG website
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
Johanna Rosen
is the pen name of a renowned German
writer who was born in 1969 and has
very successfully published books since
1993, several of which have been
translated into other languages. With
Liberty Bell. The Girl from the Woods
she has switched genres, writing for
teens and adults for the first time. The
author lives in seclusion near Frankfurt
am Main with her family.
Translation rights available from:
Arena Verlag GmbH
Rottendorfer Straße 16
97074 Würzburg, Germany
Contact: Tanja Dziewior
Tel: +49 (0)931 / 79644-62
Email: tanja.dziewior@arena-verlag.de
www.arena-verlag.de
Arena Publishing
was founded in 1949 and is today one
of the most important publishers of
books for children and young adults
in Germany. Arena publishes a broad
range of titles in its fiction and nonfiction
lists; its programme includes
titles for all age groups – from toddlers
up to young adults. Arena was the first
German children’s book publisher to
start a paperback programme in 1958.
Books from Arena have won numerous
awards and are translated into many
languages. Arena is also the German
home of internationally well-known
authors like Cassandra Clare, Roderick
Gordon and Brian Williams as well as
Tove Jansson, Jo Nesbø, Unni Lindell
and Neil Gaiman.
children AND Young Adults’ 31

Where do we go from here?
Angela Krauß is in search of the best-case scenario…
It speaks for the quality of literary
texts by Angela Krauß, a long-time
resident of Leipzig, that she is one
of the few East Germans who were
able to make a seamless transition
to the reunified German literary
world after the fall of the Wall.
Krauß began publishing prose texts
in the early 1980s in the German
Democratic Republic, but it wasn’t
until she won the prestigious
Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1988
for her short prose text Der Dienst
that she gained the attention of
a wider public. Since then, Krauß
has published numerous works
of fiction as well as a volume of
poetry – nearly all with Frankfurt’s
Suhrkamp Verlag – with topics
ranging from portrayals of life in
the GDR and reflections on post-
Wall identity, to commentaries on
culture in the USA and Russia and
the challenges of contemporary life.
Published in 1990, Der Dienst
(‘In the Line of Duty’) is a quasiautobiographical
story, told
in a lyrical prose full of tightly
composed images. It reveals
how the suicide of the narrator’s
father, a high-ranking officer in
the GDR border police, initiates
the narrator’s awareness of the
societal deformations caused by
GDR ideology. The novella provides
an astute and sensitive perspective
on what it meant to live and write
in the German Democratic Republic.
Krauß’ essayistic writing is
marked by a similarly sophisticated
blend of sensitive observation
and forthright analysis. In Die
Gesamtliebe und die Einzelliebe
(2004; ‘Total Love and Singular
Love’), the four lectures given in
the prestigious series each year
sponsored by the University of
Frankfurt, she writes of matters
which continue to interest all those
who seek insights into what and
why authors write – before, during
and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
These two texts, like Krauß’ body
of work in general, eloquently
depict the dislocations as well
as the opportunities faced by
citizens of the former GDR in
reunified Germany, not as an
historical overview, but from the
personal perspective of someone
for whom the known and familiar
world rapidly changed around her.
Audiences’ continuing fascination
with everyday life in the GDR is
evident from the lively responses
to such films as Goodbye Lenin
(2003), The Lives of Others
(2006) and Barbara (2012), as well
as Eugen Ruge’s novel In Times of
Fading Light (Faber & Faber and
Graywolf Press, 2013). Yet beyond
those more or less subtle forms of
critique and markers of dislocation,
Krauß’ texts also testify to the
resilience of the human spirit, as
she and her narrators discover a
well-spring of love and empathy
as the foundation for ongoing and
new relationships.
By Julie Klassen
Born in 1950 in Chemnitz, Angela
Krauß initially trained as a graphic
designer in Berlin. From 1976 to 1979
she studied at the Johannes R. Becher
Institute (now The German Institute
for Literature) in Leipzig. Krauß has
received numerous literary prizes as
well as invitations to hold posts as
a writer-in-residence and as a guest
lecturer at universities and colleges in
Germany, Austria, Great Britain, and
the United States. Most recently she
received the 2010 Rainer Malkowski
Prize from the Bavarian Academy of
Fine Arts, and the 2011 Franz Nabl
Prize, awarded biennially by the city
of Graz, Austria, where she was the
poet laureate in 1990. Speaking for
the Rainer Malkowski Prize jury, Albert
von Schirnding stated: ‘Angela Krauß
has created a body of work that does
not fit into any of the commonly used
rubrics of literary works: prose texts
and poems of extraordinary poetic
intensity and veracity, whose linguistic
power transforms the difficult into the
effortless, the pain into beauty.’ The
editors of prominent quarterly journal
Text und Kritik are currently preparing
a monograph on Angela Krauß for
publication in 2014.
Die Überfliegerin
(1995; ‘High-Flying Woman’)
Long indecisive about how to react to
the post-Wall changes, the narrator is
now determined to reconstruct her life,
free from her ties to the GDR. In the
search for new models, she embarks on
journeys to the erstwhile super-powers,
the USA and Russia, only to have
affirmed that the personal relationships
from her own past and her insights
about the nature of love inform the
foundation for moving forward.
Millarden neuer Sterne
(1999; ‘A Billion New Stars’)
With her narrator’s account of an
extended stay in New York in the
final weeks of the millennium, Krauß
presents the idiosyncrasies of this
vibrant metropolis from an outsider’s
viewpoint. She shows how the city
prompts participation in its life, with
unexpected consequences for the
narrator. In the course of her personal
encounters, the narrator develops a
friendship with Leo Glückselig (1914-
2003), a Viennese Jew and graphic
artist who had fled from Austria in
1938, participated in the US Army’s
liberation of Germany, and influenced
postwar German-Jewish refugee
culture in New York.
Wie weiter
(2006; ‘Where do we go from here’)
The book moves on from the issue of
personal self-realisation in post-Wall
Germany to the question of how to
prepare for and act upon the future
challenges of a changing world. As
the narrator reflects on what she has
learned from the loved ones in her
life, she comes to accept the advice of
her friend Leo, that undertaking just
any kind of small deed will, at each
step, set in motion new possibilities
for meaningful action and affirm one’s
own resourcefulness.
Im schönsten Fall
(2011; ‘Best-Case Scenario’)
The narrator of Krauß’ most recent
novel registers an accelerating sense
of free fall in the face of uncontrollable
factors in her life, ranging from the
literal and figurative tremors caused
by machines in her building that
process and transmit electronic data,
to climate change and the politics of
the increasingly urgent world summits.
Determined to regain a secure foothold,
she takes it upon herself to find the
underlying pattern of harmony that
can hold the world together.
Julie Klassen has translated both Der Dienst and Die Gesamtliebe und die Einzelliebe and is Professor Emerita of German at Carleton College.
Her interview with Angela Krauß, ‘Whenever a Living Human Being Approaches Me, I Forget Everything I’ve Ever Learned’ was published in Women in
German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture 25 (2009).
32 Article

Martin Mittelmeier
Adorno in Neapel
(Adorno in Naples)
Siedler Verlag, August 2013, 304pp. ISBN: 978-3-8275-0031-1
Intellectual tourism
Adorno in Naples is a highly original book which brings
to life a short phase in European intellectual history when
the romantic landscape of the Bay of Naples in southern
Italy became a magnet for writers, poets and philosophers.
Martin Mittelmeier’s thoughtful blend of travel-writing
and philosophy coincides with a revival of interest in the
Frankfurt School and its leading light, Theodor Adorno.
Southern Italy was traditionally the end point of the Grand
Tour undertaken by the European aristocracy and literati
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the
beginning of the twentieth century figures such as Bertolt
Brecht, Maxim Gorky and Theodor Adorno flocked to Capri
and Sorrento. This meeting of minds in the South, which
has a British parallel in the Bloomsbury circle’s enthusiasm
for the Sorrentine peninsula, has never been explored or
written about before. Like all tourists, these intellectuals
were looking for undiscovered, special places. But, of course,
as soon as such places become talked about they begin
to lose their appeal. Mittelmeier maintains that the topic
of tourism is the starting point for Adorno’s subsequent
development of his Critical Theory.
The young Adorno is a musician who is studying composition
in Vienna. At first he follows the tourist trail unwillingly,
accompanied by aspiring political journalist Siegfried
Kracauer. But soon he is enchanted by the landscape,
both for its southern gentleness and its wild, untamable
qualities. Mittelmeier recounts how Adorno’s daily diary
entries at this time lay the foundations for his mature
philosophical thinking. His thoughts are inspired both
by the natural world and by his discussions with fellow
intellectuals and are full of fascinating observations and
unique formulations. Concepts such as ‘porosity’, which
here refers to a geological characteristic of the ubiquitous
pumice rock, come to inform the social analysis in Adorno’s
later work, where he describes how the bourgeoisie aims to
fill all creative spaces in the porous fabric of society in order
to cement their power. Mittelmeier argues convincingly
that this phase in Adorno’s life, unencumbered by academic
constraints and regulations, reanimates his later philosophy,
which has often been considered difficult and hermetic.
Adorno in Naples furthers our understanding of the
European intelligentsia during the early twentieth century,
and is an invitation to rediscover Adorno.
A sample translation of this title
is available on the NBG website
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
© Olivier Favre
Martin Mittelmeier
was born in 1971 and is seen as one
of the most prominent publishing
editors for contemporary literature
in Germany. After eleven years at
Luchterhand Verlag, he has been head
of fiction at Eichborn Verlag in Cologne
since 2012. The PhD comparatist has
published several works on philology
and philosophy.
Previous works:
Ungeschriebene Werke (2006)
‘Mittelmeier has managed to give
Adorno’s philosophy a novel and yet
extremely plausible and convincing
interpretation.’
– Prof. Dr. Doris Kolesch, FU Berlin
Translation rights available from:
Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH
Rights Department
Neumarkter Str. 28
81673 Munich, Germany
Contact: Ms. Gesche Wendebourg
Tel: +49 (0)89/ 4136-3313
gesche.wendebourg@randomhouse.de
www.randomhouse.de
Siedler Verlag
(founded in 1980) is one of the most
prestigious publishers for nonfiction
books on political, historical,
social, cultural and scientific topics
in German-speaking countries. In
addition to historical works and books
on current events, the list includes
biographies and autobiographies
of well-known personalities from
history, politics, and culture. Siedler
has an international reputation as a
forum for readers interested in politics
and history. Authors published by
Siedler include Anne Applebaum, José
Carreras, Antonio Damasio, Joachim
Gauck, Martin Geck, Robert Gerwarth,
Daniel Goldhagen, Mikhail Gorbachev,
Stephen Greenblatt, Brian Greene,
Robert Kagan, Daniel Kahneman, Eric
Kandel, Peter Longerich, Geert Mak,
Wynton Marsalis, Christian Meier,
Joseph Nye, Olivier Roy, Jeffrey D.
Sachs, Simon Schama, Helmut Schmidt,
Tom Segev, and Joseph Stiglitz.
‘An achievement of great originality
that allows us to read Adorno’s work
in a new and refreshing way.
A masterpiece.’
– Winfried Menninghaus
NON-Fiction 33

Hans-Peter Riegel
Beuys. Die Biographie
(Beuys)
Aufbau, May 2013, 607pp. ISBN: 978-3-35102-764-3
An artistic enigma
This is the first objective biography of Joseph Beuys
(1921-1986) – one of the twentieth century’s most
influential and controversial artists. Hans-Peter Riegel’s
fascinating biography is an important contribution to the
debate about who this enigmatic personality really was.
Riegel’s well-researched book exposes the many
discrepancies between Beuys’ accounts of his early
life and what actually happened. Beuys gave numerous
interviews in which he reshaped events; despite insisting
it was reality, the myth that he was rescued by Tartar
tribesmen who wrapped him in fat and felt has long
been debunked. The challenge of differentiating truth
from fiction becomes especially fraught with regard to
the extent of Beuys’ involvement and identification with
National Socialism. While Beuys described his school and his
hometown of Kleve as relatively free from Nazi influence,
Riegel shows that this was far from the case. Riegel also
challenges Beuys’ claim to have rescued a number of books
from the pile of library books which were burned outside
his school.
After World War II Beuys studied sculpture, experienced
an episode of profound depression, began his academic
career and became part of the Fluxus movement. Riegel’s
descriptions of these events make great reading. He charts
the evolution of Beuys’ radical and provocative performance
practice and offers an impressive analysis of the ideas
obscured behind the chaotic performances.
By the late 1960s Beuys had achieved commercial and
critical success. Riegel revisits Beuys’ major exhibitions in
New York, Ireland and the UK. He also considers his dismissal
from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and takes a closer look
at his dubious political activities, including his involvement
with an obscure ecological party, the AUD. Beuys seems to
have seriously believed that this could provide his chance to
change the world and Riegel exposes his sympathy for the
party’s nationalist tendencies.
English-language readers will be captivated by this rigorous
portrayal of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliantly
eccentric – and ethically suspect – artists.
‘We will have to find a new way to
interpret Beuys. Riegel presents an
impressive preliminary study.’
– Die Welt
© Privat
Hans-Peter Riegel
was born in 1959 in Düsseldorf
and studied Visual Communication,
Photography and Philosophy. He met
Jörg Immendorff in 1974 and was his
assistant from 1979 to 1984 and later
became his project partner. Riegel
used to be active in advertising and
is now a Creative Consultant, doing
photography and working with concept
and film art.
Previous works:
Immendorff. Die Biographie (2010)
‘One of the most important
protagonists of Modern Art is knocked
down from his pedestal.’
– Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
Translation rights available from:
Aufbau Verlag GmbH & Co. KG
Prinzenstraße 85
10969 Berlin, Germany
Contact: Inka Ihmels
Tel: +49 30 28 394 123
Email: ihmels@aufbau-verlag.de
www.aufbau-verlag.de
‘A large proportion of the apologetic
and rapturous literature about Beuys
is rendered obsolete by [Riegel’s]
research.’ – Frankfurter Allgemeine
Aufbau Verlag
is an independent publishing house
with a broad program of fiction and
non-fiction titles. Each year, about 200
new titles are published by its four
imprints Aufbau, Rütten & Loening,
Blumenbar and Aufbau Taschenbuch.
Aufbau Verlag was founded in 1945
with the motivation to create a new
cultural orientation for the people in
post-World War II Germany. It soon
became the leading cultural and literary
publishing house in East Germany.
Today Aufbau publishes a strong
literary fiction programme with German
and international voices as well as an
outspoken non-fiction list.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
34 NON-Fiction

Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair
Amon. Mein Großvater hätte
mich erschossen
(Amon. My Grandfather Would Have Killed Me)
Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, September 2013, 382pp. ISBN: 978-3-498-06493-8
Who do you think you are?
Jennifer Teege was inspired to write her autobiography at
the age of thirty-eight after finding out that her grandfather
was the notorious Amon Göth, the commandant of Płaszów
concentration camp near Kraków in Poland. Göth was
portrayed as Oskar Schindler’s evil counterpart in Spielberg’s
film Schindler’s List.
Jennifer, who is mixed-race, was given up for adoption by
her mother and grew up in a loving adoptive family. When
she finishes school she decides to go work in a Kibbutz
in Israel, where she stays to attend university and makes
friends for life. Back in Germany she comes across a memoir
written by her biological mother, with whom she lost
contact years ago. Only then does she learn that her mother
is the daughter of Amon Göth, the notorious commandant
of Płaszów. Jennifer’s grandmother had lived with him for
a number of years, in a house right by the camp. Teege
describes her utter shock and shame: the knowledge that
she is a close relation of one of the Nazi murderers shakes
her very foundation and results in a deep depression.
Slowly she begins to make sense of the family secret
and her personal history, beginning by renewing contact
with her biological mother, Monika. She, too, is struggling
to come to terms with her heritage. Both remember
Monika’s late mother and Jennifer’s grandmother – Amon’s
lover – as a kind and loving woman. To imagine that she
had loved a sadistic and cruel killer is a very difficult burden
for both of them. Jennifer describes her slow and painful
process of healing, mainly enabled by finding the courage
to turn to her old Israeli friends. As third generation Shoah
survivors they find forgiveness in themselves and offer
invaluable friendship, despite the appalling knowledge
of the sufferings inflicted on their grandparents by Nazis
like Amon Göth.
Jennifer Teege’s extraordinary position as a mixed-race,
adopted child who only accidentally finds out about her
appalling ancestry sounds like something from a work of
fiction, but is all the more compelling for being true. Her
autobiography poses questions about how to live with the
legacy of the Nazi crimes which are of enduring interest
to Anglo-American readers. This book is not only a deeply
moving personal history, but also a wider exploration of
the guilt and shame experienced by the descendants
of Nazi perpetrators.
Jennifer Teege was born in 1970
and is the daughter of German and
Nigerian parents. Aged four weeks
she was put into a home, and adopted
when she was seven. She lived in Israel
for four years and studied there. She
has worked in advertising since 1999.
She lives in Hamburg.
© Thorsten Wulff
Nikola Sellmair was born in 1971
and graduated from the German School
of Journalism, and studied politics,
economics and communication studies
at the Ludwig Maximilian University in
Munich. She has been on the staff at
Stern magazine since the year 2000
and has received many awards for her
work as a journalist.
© Thorsten Wulff
Translation rights sold:
The Netherlands, Poland, Denmark
Translation rights available from:
Rowohlt.Berlin Verlag GmbH
c/o Rowohlt Verlag GmbH
Hamburger Straße 17
21465 Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany
Contact: Gertje Berger-Maaß
Tel: +49 (0) 40 7272 257
Email: gertje.maass@rowohlt.de
www.rowohlt.de/foreign
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
Rowohlt Verlag
was founded in 1908 and is part of the
Holtzbrinck group. Rowohlt publishes
literary and commercial fiction,
academic and popular non-fiction and
children’s books. Authors include Klaus
and Erika Mann, Imre Kertész, Elfriede
Jelinek, Peter Schneider, Eugen Ruge,
Joachim Fest, Martin Walser, Daniel
Kehlmann, David Safier, Ildikó von
Kürthy, and many others.
A sample translation of this title
is available on the NBG website
NON-Fiction 35

Peter Bieri
Eine Art zu leben – Über die
Vielfalt menschlicher Würde
(Dignity as a Way of Life – A Treatise on the Diversity of Human Dignity)
Carl Hanser Verlag, August 2013, 384pp. ISBN: 978-3-446-24349-1
Holding our heads high
Dignity is an essential measure of human life. But what do we
actually mean when we talk about dignity? Peter Bieri’s new
book is an eloquent discussion of this central facet of our lives.
Bieri approaches the subject of dignity through everyday
examples from life and literature. In so doing he demonstrates
how dignity is much more than an abstract concept and
constitutes a particular way of being in the world: a pattern
for how individuals think, experience things and act.
Bieri identifies three conceptually distinct yet interrelated
dimensions of human dignity concerning the way in which
an individual is dealt with by others, how an individual deals
with others, and how an individual relates to themselves in
terms of their sense of self-worth. The first two dimensions
involve interpersonal relationships whereas the third
addresses how the value we place upon ourselves influences
how we see others, which in turn affects how others perceive
our dignity. The book investigates these three dimensions
of dignity in eight chapters which discuss how dignity has a
bearing across the spectrum of our day to day experiences.
Bieri’s book could be read as a complete manifesto for a
balanced and respectful way of life and yet its readable
style and clear structure also make it possible for readers
to dip in and out of the text in order to focus on how dignity
relates to a particular sort of experience. In his discussion of
how dignity is involved with the elementary human need for
independence, Bieri explains the roles of work and money
in determining dignity. In the chapter on honesty detailed
examples are given to show how lies, whether simple or
complex, affect the dignity of both the liar and the person
being lied to. The chapter on encounters introduces dignity
in relationships, covering its manifestation throughout
the course of a relationship. It addresses topics such as
commitment, stability, manipulation, deception and abuse.
The discussion of intimacy is concerned with the dividing
line between privacy and openness, which varies from
culture to culture and from person to person. Finally, Bieri
considers how our acceptance of our mortality shapes our
dignity, which accordingly influences our conduct during
times of illness or hardship.
While this title will certainly be of interest to an academic
audience, Bieri’s accessible and wide-ranging book is
written in plain language which reinforces its considerable
popular appeal.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany or Switzerland (see page 40)
© Privat
Peter Bieri
was born in 1944 in Bern. He studied
philosophy and classics and was
Professor of philosophy at Bielefeld,
Marburg and the Free University of
Berlin. Carl Hanser Verlag published
his book Das Handwerk der Freiheit
(2001), as well as the novel Nachtzug
nach Lissabon (2004) and the novella
Lea (2007), both penned under the
pseudonym of Pascal Mercier.
Previous works:
Das Handwerk der Freiheit (2001)
‘This book is invaluable in expanding
our understanding of fundamental
questions of identity.’
– Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
on The Tools of Freedom
Translation rights available from:
Carl Hanser Verlag
Kolbergerstr. 22, 81679 Munich,
Germany
Contact: Friederike Barakat
Tel: +49 89 998 30 509
Email: Barakat@hanser.de
www.hanser-literaturverlage.de
‘Beautifully lucid and saturated with
intuition, [Bieri’s] writing keeps us
hooked like the most compelling
of novels. An indispensable book,
especially at a time when the concept
of freedom is being increasingly
eroded. A truly liberating read.’
– Rüdiger Safranski on The Tools
of Freedom
Carl Hanser Verlag
was established by its eponymous
owner in 1928 in Munich, and its
founder’s interests in both literature
and science have been maintained
to the present day. The firm publishes
fiction and non-fiction for both adults
and children. Its authors include
Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Jostein
Gaarder, Lars Gustafsson, Milan
Kundera, Harry Mulisch, Philip Roth,
Susan Sontag, Botho Strauß, Raoul
Schrott, Rafik Schami, Alfred Brendel,
Elke Heidenreich and ten Nobel Prize
winners, among them Elias Canetti,
whose works have been translated into
more than thirty different languages.
36 NON-Fiction

Katharina Diel-Gligor, Wolfgang Gründinger, Ali Aslan Gümüsay (Eds.)
7 Tugenden Reloaded. Zukunftsmodelle des Think
Tank 30 / Deutsche Gesellschaft des Club of Rome
(7 Virtues Reloaded)
Vergangenheitsverlag, April 2013, 204pp. ISBN: 978-3-86408-143-9
A moral compass for our times
If people have never had it so good, then why is society
in crisis? Why must today’s political and economic progress
come at the expense of tomorrow? How can citizens be
motivated to participate in political discussions instead
of merely consuming them?
Think Tank 30 was formed with the mission of tackling such
urgent questions with a fresh and positive outlook. It is a
network of young minds looking to find solutions to some
of the modern world’s problems, including poverty, social
inequality, environmental issues and the economic crisis.
7 Virtues Reloaded takes a valiant step in this direction. The
book is premised on the idea that the world is in flux. In
the hectic global environment of ever-faster change, people
are continually asked to rise to new challenges while also
seeking a conventional sense of belonging. But what can we
turn to when the only thing that is certain is that nothing
is going to stay as it is? How is it still possible to live
virtuously? Think Tank 30 seeks to develop forward-looking
models which will help to ensure that the classic virtues
which shaped our civilisation have a place in its future.
The book does a fantastic job of putting forward serious
issues in an approachable way, through case studies telling
the stories of fictional protagonists who encounter a problem
and then hit upon a virtue that is instrumental in developing
a solution. Its innovative approach sets this title apart from
other books with similar aims while the human stories add
to the book’s charm and make it an all the more engaging
read. The debates that follow each story examine the
four platonic virtues of wisdom, moderation, fairness and
courage, as well as the three virtues extolled in the Christian
gospel of faith, hope and love. They then seek to apply
these virtues to counteract cultural, environmental and
social crises. Thoughtful, well-researched and constructive
solutions are put forward, drawn from the group’s collective
wealth of knowledge.
7 Virtues Reloaded grapples with current sociopolitical
problems with international dimensions such as the plight
of education, intergenerational strife, social unrest and the
misuse of data. In their consideration of seven historically
prized virtues as a means of practical moral orientation in
the modern world the book’s authors produce new insights
about how to live responsibly within the hyper-capitalist
global village we call home.
Katharina Diel-Gligor is a doctoral
student at the University of Heidelberg
and is researching international
economic law. She completed her
law studies in Mainz and Paris and
subsequently earned a Master of Laws
(LL.M.) from Columbia University.
© Vergangenheitsverlag, Berlin
Wolfgang Gründinger is the author
of Meine kleine Volkspartei (2013),
Wir Zukunftssucher (2012) and
Aufstand der Jungen (2009). He has
won numerous awards, such as the
Intergenerational Justice Prize, the
German Study Prize and the Study Prize
of the German Home Office. He lives in
Berlin and on the Internet.
© Wolfgang Gründinger
Ali Aslan Gümüsay is a doctoral
student at the Saïd Business School
at the University of Oxford. He
teaches and conducts research on
knowledge management, innovation,
entrepreneurship, strategy, organisation
theory and religion.
© Vergangenheitsverlag, Berlin
Translation rights available from:
Vergangenheitsverlag, Berlin
Am Friedrichshain 22, 10407 Berlin,
Germany
Contact: Dr. Alexander Schug
Tel: +49 30 419367 36
Email: info@vergangenheitsverlag.de
www.vergangenheitsverlag.de
Vergangenheitsverlag is an
ambitious young and independent
publishing house in the heart of Berlin
founded by the historian Dr. Alexander
Schug. Since 2008 it has published
non-fiction literature on historical and
political topics. Vergangenheitsverlag is
increasingly sought out by established
authors who are seeking to address a
broader audience.
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
NON-Fiction 37

A Forgotten Gem
Alfred Döblin (1878 – 1957)
is one of the most important Germanspeaking
writers of the twentieth century.
As a radical literary experimenter, he is
most commonly remembered for his novel
Berlin Alexanderplatz, a masterpiece
of European Modernism and regularly
considered to be among the best books of
all time. But already before its publication
in 1929, Döblin’s unique literary voice
had been recognised within the cultural
debates of the Berlin avant-garde. His
adventurous narrative approach made
him an inspirational figure for the rising
generation of the 1920s, showing the
modern era in all its polyphony. As the son
of assimilated Jews, Döblin was forced
into exile at the beginning of the Nazi
dictatorship and spent several years in
France and the United States. His œuvre
spans more than half a century and takes
in a wide variety of literary movements,
styles and genres – from historical novels
to science fiction, to stories about the
modern metropolis.
Translation rights available from:
S. Fischer Verlag
Hedderichstrasse 114
60596 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Tel: +49 69 6062297
Email: Katrin.Meerkamp@fischerverlage.de
Contact: Katrin Meerkamp
www.fischerverlage.de
Application for assistance
with translation costs:
Germany (see page 40)
© Archiv S. Fischer Verlag
Alfred Döblin
Die Ermordung
einer Butterblume.
Gesammelte Erzählungen
(The Murder of a Buttercup and other stories)
Fischer Klassik, ISBN: 978-3-596-90459-4
A middle-aged man finds himself assaulting a buttercup, a dancer kills her ‘body’ when it doesn’t obey her,
and a couple commits suicide after a happy day on a boat trip – these are Alfred Döblin’s sometimes disturbing,
but hauntingly beautiful short stories. As modern fairy tales, they explore the frailties of the human condition,
depicting the lowest depths in men and women – the despair under a thin veneer of civilisation. Long before
Berlin Alexanderplatz, but written with the same radical spirit, Döblin’s short story collection, published in
1913, is uncompromising in its illustration of the human capacity for extreme forms of behaviour.
The title story is a wonderful example of the author’s keen eye for the revealing power of the grotesque:
for no apparent reason a businessman, Michael Fischer, attacks a buttercup with his walking stick and
subsequently builds up an introverted love-hate relationship with the plant. Fischer feels guilty and yet
also wishes to assert his authority over the plant. What in the beginning emerges as an utterly trivial event
becomes a manic obsession, resulting in more flowers being destroyed.
While the tale of the buttercup is inevitably somewhat comical, the story ‘The Dancer and the Body’ is told
without the slightest hint of irony or satire; its fascination lies in its cruel and depersonalised description of
a young woman’s self-hatred. Ella, who is only nineteen-years-old and an accomplished dancer, develops a
fatal, unexplained illness after having disciplined her body with extreme exercise and sheer will power. The
strict separation between identity and body – the latter being nothing more than a troublesome, defunct
‘piece of meat’ – seems to be the only way for her to maintain control, giving her a feeling of superiority
over her mother and her physicians, as well as other patients.
Although the stories are not connected – in fact, they stand out through constantly changing themes and
tones – they share certain topics which are crucial for Döblin’s entire literary production. The correlations
between vitality and aggression, sexuality and violence, turn out to be as characteristic for the works that
follow this collection as the blurred boundaries between normal and pathological behaviour. Having specialised
in the treatment of nervous diseases as a doctor, Döblin’s narrative style comes close to the principle of exact
psychiatric observation and has lost nothing of its power to stimulate and provoke.
Comparable in stature to contemporaries like Thomas Mann, Robert Musil or Franz Kafka, the revival of
this unceasingly inventive author started only recently and is still ongoing. Fischer Verlag, Döblin’s literary
home before 1933, has been republishing modern volumes of almost his complete œuvre in German since
2008, and English translations will surely follow. His early short stories with their anti-heroic protagonists
and open endings are captivating from the word go and will attract those looking for an extraordinary
reading experience.
By Kerstin Germer
A ‘Forgotten Gem’ – Rediscovered
A translation of one of our previous ‘Forgotten Gems’ has been awarded the 2013 PEN Translation Prize.
Die Insel des zweiten Gesichts (The Island of Second Sight, Overlook Press) by Albert Vigoleis Thelen
was translated by Donald O. White with Goethe-Institut funding after being discovered in the magazine.
We are delighted by the news and congratulate Donald O. White on this incredible achievement.
38 A forgotten gem

José F. A. Oliver has been hailed as an ‘interpreter of two worlds’ (El Mercurio, Chile).
The convergence of his mother tongue (Spanish) and his second language (German)
can be felt in his innovative and unconventional approach to the German language.
Oliver tests semantic and spatial boundaries – he pulls words apart, frees them from
their typical usages and imbues them with new and instinctive meanings.
deathdance 1
the one who undertakes the swell of the world
in the small boat Solitude / who
undertakes the bundle
the magnolia the tree
in bloom year-inyear-out
in childhoodbloom &
undertakes the woundred
gaping laugh, the voiceless laugh and the eyebrightening
BLOOM. For him
soon
at parting (= part of arriving) a winter
will be tabled
with both hands, free:hand
& the questions
the FEAR piercing
words: There’s someone there!
Someone sitting at the table. Who
is that? Everything an evernothing & no solacegiving
fellow traveller
that one
deathdance 2
& could – so sub
versive – at the gravesedge & could
finagle into heaven
by prayer means or foul &
wonder at the falling
earth &
pay the pallbearers
an obolus
(mere manufactories
even the end) & could
lay on hands
like you & let down lower,
lower down what
was
learning the ropedrop
the low tremor
tremoring lower lower & forever
at the edge
of the conditional
deathdance 3
& again the mediterannean
ocean, the mediochre
undersand
& no:where a place to trade, unless
in net-thrall
a fishcadaver, a corpse-haul, suddenly
lingeringly
lighthouseanchored
the remote
controlled dance of a fracture
of light / its towrope
coming to wrest
eyes wide
open
deathdance 4
it is
as if I’m waiting &
the waiting is unease &
the unease a waiting
for the word
a nowhere
it is
as if I’m waiting &
the waiting is a nowhere &
a nowhere is the word
& unease only
a nomore
it is
as if I’m waiting &
the waiting is a nomore &
a nomore is nowhere
no word
it
Eyjafjallajökull
A provisional poem
The sky’s kiss
is ash-bread. Time
tautens
ejaculated dust.
Now human & be:ing & earth must
uncollect themselves
like waves, &
drip into the gravemouth:
wounddead. Silence
in the air
that gnaws the
fallen sol
diers / numberless
an onymous trembling. The tracks
disgorge a glut
of bones
that stick in your throat. Natura viva
leaks out, post-mortem
the death hollow of the ear
is stopped up, blinded:
a command per pedes. The tidings
are unrepeatable
let them go unrepeated
they follow suddenlies
in lynch-thrall. Speechless
meetings in the omega.
In the trenches
of the alpha & surer still
in the patrols of lust
the clocks feigning death.
Volcano & warzone & tickets
are kunduzlike
in the explosive sludge of words
messages topple
& drop
& are lost
José F. A. Oliver was born in 1961
and has enjoyed great critical success
since his poetry was first published in
1987. He is especially admired for his
experimental approach to the German
language, combining Alemannic
dialect with the rhythms of Spanish.
Oliver hails from Baden-Württemberg
and writes about his dual Spanish-
German background. His most recent
essay collection is called Mein
andalusianisches Schwarzwalddorf
(Suhrkamp, 2007) and his most recent
poetry collection is fahrtenschreiber
(Suhrkamp, 2010)
Romy Fursland has just completed
an MA in Literary Translation at the
University of East Anglia and is a
translator from German and French. Her
translations of ten of José F. A. Oliver’s
poems were read alongside the originals
at the latest event in the Contemporary
European Poets 2013 series.
Poet in
the City
Poems by José F. A. Oliver
Translated by Romy Fursland
Original poems © Suhrkamp Verlag
POETRY 39
© Uwe Dettmar / Suhrkamp Verlag
As well as aiming to help new audiences
across London access poetry the charity
Poet in the City supports poetry
education schemes and promotes
poetry as a tool in urban renewal.
In collaboration with publishers and
creative partners, the organisation holds
poetry readings and talks in a range of
venues throughout the year, including
its series Contemporary European
Poets 2013, co-organised by University
College London. In 2014 Poet in the
City is planning an exciting range of
other German language events, including
a high profile Goethe celebration and
further events with contemporary
German poets.

The German Book Prize 2013
Launched in 2005, the German
Book Prize is the equivalent of the
Man Booker Prize, seeking the best
novel written in German in each
publishing year. It is awarded at the
Frankfurt Book Fair in October. Four
previous winners have already been
translated into English: Arno Geiger’s
We Are Doing Fine (Ariadne Press
2010), Katharina Hacker’s The
Have-Nots (Europa Editions 2008),
Julia Franck’s The Blind Side of the
Heart (Harvill 2009) and the 2011
winner, In Zeiten des Abnehmenden
Lichts by Eugen Ruge, published this
year (Faber).
This will be New Books in German’s
second year of being the German Book
Prize’s English-language media-partner.
Our website features exclusive profiles
of the six shortlisted authors, synopses
of the novels and English extracts:
www.new-books-in-german.com
This year’s longlist was announced in
August and includes Nie Mehr Nacht
by Mirko Bonné (see review p. 2),
Soutines letzte Fahrt by Ralph Dutli
(see review p. 5) and Vogelweide by
Uwe Timm (see review p. 16), as well
as two titles reviewed in this year’s
spring issue: Wann wird es endlich
wieder so, wie es nie war by Joachim
Meyerhoff and Frühling der Barbaren
by Jonas Lüscher.
The 2013 prize will be awarded on
the evening of Monday, 7 October.
Translation Grants – How to Apply
Once a publisher has acquired the translation rights to a work of literature by a German writer, and a contract
has been signed between the publisher and a translator, the publisher can apply for a translation grant.
All fiction books featured in New Books in German and bought by an English-language publisher
are guaranteed a grant. Non-Fiction books by German and Swiss authors are guaranteed a grant.
Germany
Applications should be made to the Goethe-Institut in your country.
The local Goethe-Institut will then check whether your application is
complete and pass it on to the Goethe-Institut’s head office in Munich
with their comments.
If you are interested in publishing a title not featured in New Books in
German, please contact your local Goethe-Institut directly.
The form to be filled out for these applications is available at
the following webpage, which has a lot of useful information in
English: http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/prj/uef/enindex.htm
Contact person in London:
Jens Boyer, Goethe-Institut London
Tel: +44 20 7596 4020 jens.boyer@london.goethe.org
Contact person in North America:
Brigitte Doellgast, Goethe-Institut New York
Tel: +1 212 439 8694 doellgast@newyork.goethe.org
Contact person in the Goethe-Institut Head Office:
Andreas Schmohl, Goethe-Institut Munich
Tel: +49 89 15921-852 schmohl@goethe.de
Austria
Applications for adult fiction or children’s books should be made to
the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture
in good time before the book goes to print.
Applications should include:
n copies of the contracts between the publishing houses and
with the translator
n information about the translator (CV and list of translated works)
n the translation or partial translation (where possible)
40 News and information
Switzerland
Pro Helvetia covers up to 100% of the effective translation costs for
literary works by Swiss authors (fiction and poetry), books for children
and teenagers (where they may cover part of the licensing fees), nonfiction
books by Swiss authors on cultural and artistic topics pertaining
to Switzerland, and plays by Swiss dramatists (including surtitles).
Applications must be submitted to Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council by the
licensed publisher. Pro Helvetia accepts applications at any time, but they
must be submitted at least three months before a book goes to print.
Application portal: www.myprohelvetia.ch
Applications should include:
n signed copies of the licence agreement and the translation contract
n original text and its translation (at least 20 pages)
Translation fees will be paid out directly to the translator by Pro Helvetia
upon publication. Translation fees are based on the translation contract
and calculated according to the established rates in the country in question.
Contact Person:
Angelika Salvisberg, Head, Literature and Society
Tel: +41 44 267 71 26 asalvisberg@prohelvetia.ch www.prohelvetia.ch.
The application form can be downloaded from:
www.bmukk.gv.at/medienpool/15055/form_foerderungsersuchen.pdf
This form is in German but help is on hand from:
Dr. Robert Stocker:
Gerhard Auinger:
Tel: +43-1-53120-6850 Tel: +43-1-53120-6852
robert.stocker@bmukk.gv.at gerhard.auinger@bmukk.gv.at

Issue 34 – The Editorial Committee
Editorial Committee for this issue:
Jamie Bulloch, Translator; Jennifer Calleja, NBG Acting Editor;
Katy Derbyshire, Translator; Romy Fursland, NBG Editorial Assistant;
Kerstin Germer, NBG Editorial Assistant; Andrew Hayden, NBG Editorial
Assistant; Tanja Howarth, Tanja Howarth Literary Agency; David Kilian
Beck, Embassy of Switzerland; Elisabeth Koegler, Austrian Cultural Forum
Director; Andreas Langenbacher, Pro Helvetia; Saara Marchadour, Literary
Consultant; Sheridan Marshall, NBG Editorial Consultant; Elisabeth Pyroth,
Goethe-Institut London; Jonathan Ruppin, Foyles Bookshop; Jenny Watson,
NBG Editorial Assistant; Anne Zauner, Literaturhaus Wien.
Editorial Committee in the USA:
Brigitte Doellgast, Goethe-Institut New York; Edna McCown,
Goethe-Institut New York; Sarah McNally, McNally Jackson Books;
Grace Moss, German Book Office; Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review;
Barbara Perlmutter, Publishing Representative/Agent; Daniela Rapp, St.
Martin’s Press; Sal Robinson, Melville House; Bettina Schrewe, Bettina
Schrewe Literary Scouting Agency; Riky Stock, German Book Office
This issue was produced in co-operation with the German Book
Office New York and the Goethe-Institut New York.
Contacts
Published by: The British Centre for Literary Translation,
University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ
Acting Editor: Jennifer Calleja
New Books in German
c/o Goethe-Institut
50 Princes Gate
Exhibition Road
London SW7 2PH
Editorial
Consultant:
Associate
in the USA:
Email: nbg@london.goethe.org
www.new-books-in-german.com
Sheridan Marshall
nbg-reviews@london.goethe.org
Riky Stock
Director, German Book Office New York,
72 Spring Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10012
Tel: +1 (212) 794-2851 Fax: +1 (212) 794-2870
Email: stock@newyork.gbo.org
Financial and moral support for New Books in German
is provided by the Foreign Ministries of Austria, Germany and
Switzerland, Pro Helvetia (Arts Council of Switzerland), the Austrian
Cultural Forum, the Goethe-Institut in Munich and London, the Frankfurt
Book Fair and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels.
Steering Committee for New Books in German:
Barbara Becker (Frankfurt Book Fair); Franziska Heimgartner (Embassy
of Switzerland); Tanja Howarth (Tanja Howarth Literary Agency);
Elisabeth Koegler (Austrian Cultural Forum); Sheridan Marshall (NBG
Editorial Consultant); Jennifer Calleja (NBG Acting Editor); Jens Boyer
(Goethe-Institut); Eva Schmitt (Goethe-Institut); Christin Stein (German
Embassy); Shaun Whiteside (British Centre for Literary Translation)
For information on the background to New Books in German,
or if you have questions on distribution or would like to be
added to the mailing list, please contact the editor.
Printed by: SGC Printing, Stephens & George Ltd
© The British Centre for Literary Translation and contributors
respectively, 2013

IN GERMAN
ERMAN NEW
N NEW BOO
EW BOOKS I
Tamara Bach Christoph W. Bauer Mirko Bonné Ann Cotten
n n n
Friedrich Christian Delius Katharina Diel-Gligor, Wolfgang Gründinger and
n
Ali Aslan Gümüsay Ralph Dutli Michael Fehr Andrea Gerster Katharina Hartwell
n n n n
Helene Hegemann Finn-Ole Heinrich Charlotte Inden Martin Mittelmeier
n n n
Matthias Politycki Markus Ramseier Hans-Peter Riegel Johanna Rosen
n n n
Sarah Stricker Judith W. Taschler Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair
n n
Uwe Timm Henriette Vásárhelyi Stefanie de Velasco Anna Weidenholzer
n n n
New Books in German
c/o Goethe-Institut, 50 Princes Gate
Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PH
Tel: +44 20 7596 4023
Email: nbg@london.goethe.org