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Princes, Counts and Racists

David Blackbourn: Weimar, 19 May 2016

Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present 
by Michael Kater.
Yale, 463 pp., £25, August 2014, 978 0 300 17056 6
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... von Fallersleben, author of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles’. The exception was Franz Liszt, who spent thirty years in Weimar in all. He first appeared in 1841 and was soon offered the post of extraordinary Kapellmeister. He took up the offer in 1848, arriving with his new lover, Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, and moving into the ...

What kind of funny is he?

Rivka Galchen: Under Kafka’s Spell, 4 December 2014

Kafka: The Years of Insight 
by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch.
Princeton, 682 pp., £24.95, June 2013, 978 0 691 14751 2
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Kafka: The Decisive Years 
by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch.
Princeton, 552 pp., £16.25, June 2013, 978 0 691 14741 3
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... those who have spent next to no time thinking.) My own such amateur conviction is that the life of Franz Kafka reads like a truly great comedy. I mean this (of course) in large part because of the tragedies in and around his life, and I mean it in the tradition of comedies like the final episode of Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, which, after ...

Nonetheless

John Bayley, 2 February 1989

The Lost Voices of World War One: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights 
edited by Tim Cross.
Bloomsbury, 406 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 7475 0276 5
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Poems 
by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger.
Anvil, 350 pp., £15.95, January 1989, 0 85646 198 9
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Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War Two Aviator 
by Samuel Hynes.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £13.95, November 1988, 0 7475 0333 8
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... flu just before the Armistice, Apollinaire would have sailed effortlessly into Modernism like Franz Marc or Gaudier-Brzeska, shrugging off the immediate trauma of the conflict and utilising it in the space of their genius, as the non-combatants Picasso or T.S. Eliot were to do. In a very different way Edward Thomas, who found his true voice in the war but ...

How to Prepare for Debates

Hal Foster: Rasta for Dada, 22 October 2020

Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist and Those Aspiring to Become One 
by Walter Serner, translated by Mark Kanak.
Twisted Spoon Press, 189 pp., £15, July, 978 80 86264 45 5
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At the Blue Monkey: 33 Outlandish Stories 
by Walter Serner, translated by Erik Butler.
Wakefield, 192 pp., £13.99, December 2019, 978 1 939663 46 7
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... its fair share of clever rogues, and no one played the role with more self-conscious élan than Walter Serner, who compiled an aphoristic guide to succeeding as a con artist in a Europe roiled by social upheaval, economic chaos and political intrigue after the First World War. Born in 1889 to an affluent Jewish family in the Bohemian town of Karlsbad (now ...

Germans and the German Past

J.P. Stern, 21 December 1989

The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity 
by Charles Maier.
Harvard, 227 pp., £17.95, November 1988, 0 674 92975 6
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Historikerstreit 
Piper, 397 pp., DM 17.80, July 1987, 3 492 10816 4Show More
In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past 
by Richard Evans.
Tauris, 196 pp., £12.95, October 1989, 1 85043 146 9
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Why did the heavens not darken? 
by Arno Mayer.
Verso, 510 pp., £19.95, October 1989, 0 86091 267 1
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A German Identity, 1770-1990 
by Harold James.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £16.95, March 1989, 9780297795049
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Die Republikaner: Phantombild der neuen Rechten 
by Claus Leggewie.
Rotbuch, 155 pp., May 1989, 3 88022 011 5
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Ich war dabei 
by Franz Schönhuber.
Langen Müller, 356 pp., April 1989, 3 7844 2249 7
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... as the more accurate designation of the events; and he rejects the term ‘Holocaust’ (as Walter Laqueur did before him), a word that has petrified into an empty cliché since it was given currency by an American television show. What was done to the Jews, Mayer rightly observes, has nothing to do with the word’s traditional meaning: they were not ...

I am not a world improver

Christopher Turner: Building Seagram, 6 February 2014

Building Seagram 
by Phyllis Lambert.
Yale, 306 pp., £45, January 2013, 978 0 300 16767 2
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Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography 
by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst.
Chicago, 493 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 226 15145 8
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... into Alcoholics Anonymous. The revised Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, an expansion of Franz Schulze’s definitive 1985 study, co-authored with the architect Edward Windhorst, includes new interviews with Marx. ‘I was hungover most of the time,’ she said of their early years. ‘Mies was fascinated by the fact that I stopped as suddenly as I ...

Perfect and Serene Oddity

Michael Hofmann: The Strangeness of Robert Walser, 16 November 2006

Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912-32 
by Robert Walser, translated and edited by Christopher Middleton.
Nebraska, 128 pp., £9.99, November 2005, 0 8032 9833 1
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... age or any condition – for his perfect and serene oddity’. Start over. This is the essayist Franz Blei’s recollection of his first meeting with Walser, in 1898: A few days later, he stood in my room and said I am Walser. A tall rather lanky fellow with ruddy, bony features, under a thick blond thatch that fought off the comb, dreamy blue-grey eyes ...

At the Café Central

Andrew Forge, 22 March 1990

First Diasporist Manifesto 
by R.B. Kitaj.
Thames and Hudson, 128 pp., £7.95, May 1989, 0 500 27543 2
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Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987 
by John Ashbery, edited by David Bergman.
Carcanet, 417 pp., £25, February 1990, 9780856358074
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... the tape-recorder cries just before the last curtain of Les Séquestrés d’Altona, ‘I Franz von Gerlach ... have taken this century upon my shoulders and have said I will answer for it. This day and forever. What do you say?’ This is Kitaj’s tone. It’s preposterous – or it would be if it were not clear that he is the first target of his ...

Am I intruding?

Peter Campbell: Open Windows, 3 November 2011

Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century 
by Sabine Rewald.
Yale, 190 pp., £20, March 2011, 978 0 300 16977 5
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... you are denied full information – bringing to mind the scene in The Woman in White in which Walter Hartright first sees Marian Halcombe: I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the ...
The Age of Terrorism 
by Walter Laqueur.
Weidenfeld, 385 pp., £17.95, March 1987, 9780297791157
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The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon 
by Stefan Aust, translated by Anthea Bell.
Bodley Head, 552 pp., £12.95, June 1987, 0 370 31031 4
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... In the first few pages of Walter Laqueur’s The Age of Terrorism (largely a reworking and updating of his 1977 work, Terrorism), the author attempts to confront the old adage that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ Laqueur will have none of it: Of all the observations on terrorism this is surely one of the tritest ...

Yes, die

Gerald Hammond, 23 May 1996

The Five Books of Moses 
translated by Everett Fox.
Harvill, 1024 pp., £25, March 1996, 1 86046 142 5
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... of Bible translation as anything else in English I know, cites as his precursors Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. Their German Bible was produced between 1925 and 1962 (it was largely Buber’s: Rosenzweig died in 1929), and its guiding idea was to ‘mimic the particular rhetoric of the Hebrew whenever possible, preserving such devices as ...

The Hierophant

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Servant King, 10 March 2022

George V: Never a Dull Moment 
by Jane Ridley.
Chatto, 559 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 0 7011 8870 2
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For King and Country: The British Monarchy and the First World War 
by Heather Jones.
Cambridge, 576 pp., £29.99, September 2021, 978 1 108 42936 8
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... of kills that was all-important. George wasn’t just a superb shot – better even than Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who chalked up half a million kills before his assassination at Sarajevo – but a manic one. He shot with such intensity that a member of his party once had to have a lie down under a hedge before he could resume the slaughter; on another ...

What Buthelezi wants

R.W. Johnson, 19 December 1991

... the Kwazulu cabinet room is studded with photographs of Buthelezi with Thatcher, with Reagan, with Franz-Josef Strauss, with the Pope. The same logic drives the IFP into the crazy situation where they value the presence of Treurnicht’s CP at their conference. In his pre-circulated speech, Buthelezi studiously avoided all mention of the funding ...

Diary

Karl Miller: Football Tribes, 1 June 1989

... Rowse (after Fraser’s book came out) as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The ballads collected by Walter Scott contain wonderful praise – together with much that is more wonderful – of reiver exploits, of their boldness. But Fraser is sharp with Scott’s worshipful view of his ancestors. Scott and his minstrels forgot to stress that reiver practice was ...

The Trouble with Publishers

Fritz Stern, 19 September 1996

The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography 
by William Schaberg.
Chicago, 297 pp., £29.95, March 1996, 0 226 73575 3
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... thinks ‘Unconventional Observations’ would be a better translation than Walter Kaufmann’s Untimely Meditations because indicative of his ‘aggressive intent’. I prefer Kaufmann’s rendition.) The definitive turn from classicist to philosopher-psychologist-prophet came with Human, All Too Human, published in 1878, with a ...

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