I've posted about German writers on stamps before, so I was rather taken by a brief piece in the trade mag Börsenblatt about a new Hans Fallada stamp, which was in some mysterious way issued by his publishers, Aufbau Verlag. I'm not quite sure how publishers manage to issue postage stamps, but apparently it's worth 55c (enough to send a small letter inside Germany), it's being given away to selected booksellers and journalists – and you can actually use it. And they also wanted to encourage the finance minister to use the picture for an official stamp. But there's not much chance of that, I'm afraid, for despite having posthumously sold a whopping 150,000 copies of the new extended director's cut of Jeder stirbt für sich allein, Hans Fallada already had his own stamp back in 1993.
A shame, really, that the German post office won't be doing the publisher's advertising for them free of charge. Although it is about time they put another writer on a stamp - the last one was Borges back in October of last year, marking Argentina's spot as guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Ah, literature meets philately - possibly one of the nerdiest combinations ever. Mind you, I did see a guy the other day wearing a "Star Wars Sucks" T-shirt. I think only a T-shirt printed with a fictitious Arno Schmidt postage stamp could possibly top that. And one day I'll get round to posting about German trains named after writers.
Showing posts with label hans fallada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hans fallada. Show all posts
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Friday, 18 June 2010
Ulrich Ditzen in Company in Berlin
Much more excitingly, Bookslut and Dialogue Berlin held a fantastic event last night to big up Michael Hofmann's recent translation of Hans Fallada's Jeder stirbt für sich allein. I won't go into the vagaries of evening childcare solutions here - suffice to say I was very pleased to make it.
Sharmaine Reid of Dialogue and Jessa Crispin of Bookslut are a bit of a dream team, two women with burning passions for books and the get-up-and-go of a herd of rhinos. And I'm not just saying that because they're my friends. This wasn't their first joint event, but it was the first to focus on a German book in translation. And they went to a great deal of trouble to organise a very impressive evening of Anglo-American-style literary entertainment.
It started with readings in German - very expressive with much finger-pointing and Berlin dialect, a pleasant change from the Charlie Brown's teacher-style delivery you often get over here - and English. Bizarrely, the readers were interrupted by something Hans Fallada and his characters could never have imagined – large numbers of gays and lesbians in sailor suits partying on barges outside the windows of the gorgeous venue, the Direktorenhaus. If you happen to organise literary events in Berlin, I can highly recommend the place by the way, provided Cristopher Street Day isn't coming up.
After this brief intermission, Jessa interviewed Fallada's oldest son Ulrich Ditzen. A former lawyer, 80-year-old Ditzen had us all rather charmed. He talked about growing up with his father, how he was a great teller of bedtime stories and an obsessive writer who set himself the near impossible target of never writing less than the previous day. He refuted the claim on the book jacket that his father could have left Nazi Germany. Fallada had two families there to support, Ditzen with his brother and mother installed in rural Mecklenburg, and his second wife and daughter in Berlin. He saw no way to leave without plunging them all into poverty and insecurity - as in fact happened to many writers in exile.
Ditzen also talked about how the book came about, based like all of his father's writing on fact. He was a little coy about the involvement of the writer Johannes R. Becher, at the time a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, in providing his father with the Gestapo case file on which the novel is based. I find it interesting that Alone in Berlin has been so enthusiastically received in Britain and the US, and I think one reason is that its author is untainted by political scandal in a way that almost all other German writers who tackled the subject of resistance to the Nazis weren't. In fact the book could be placed next to many others by East German writers who went on to get drawn into Cold War cultural policy. Anna Seghers, the writer of the outstanding The Seventh Cross and Transit, is just one case in point. After her return from Mexican exile, she became a functionary in the East German system and ended up making many questionable literary and political decisions in her later years. Fallada, of course, died in 1947, before the GDR was even founded.
The questions from the floor revealed how mixed the audience was - from Germans with perfect English who grew up with Fallada's children's books to new arrivals obviously (how shall I put this?) making their first acquaintance with German literature and history. Ditzen fielded them with aplomb, only answering the bits he wanted to and getting really rather flirtatious towards the end. He gave the impression of being a man with a strong mind who genuinely loved his father and still loves his work. And he highly recommended Fallada's Wolf Among Wolves about 1920s Germany - his best book, he told us. I bought the newly revamped English version, and found it was originally translated by Philip Owens with modern additions by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs.
Ditzen then had to leave, but the evening was rounded off with more readings from the original and translation. All in all, it was a great success - standing room only, happy punters, books sold. I hope there'll be more opportunities to present translations from German in the Bookslut/Dialogue events series - which seems like a logical thing to do in Berlin – and I can well recommend their other readings too.
Sharmaine Reid of Dialogue and Jessa Crispin of Bookslut are a bit of a dream team, two women with burning passions for books and the get-up-and-go of a herd of rhinos. And I'm not just saying that because they're my friends. This wasn't their first joint event, but it was the first to focus on a German book in translation. And they went to a great deal of trouble to organise a very impressive evening of Anglo-American-style literary entertainment.
It started with readings in German - very expressive with much finger-pointing and Berlin dialect, a pleasant change from the Charlie Brown's teacher-style delivery you often get over here - and English. Bizarrely, the readers were interrupted by something Hans Fallada and his characters could never have imagined – large numbers of gays and lesbians in sailor suits partying on barges outside the windows of the gorgeous venue, the Direktorenhaus. If you happen to organise literary events in Berlin, I can highly recommend the place by the way, provided Cristopher Street Day isn't coming up.
After this brief intermission, Jessa interviewed Fallada's oldest son Ulrich Ditzen. A former lawyer, 80-year-old Ditzen had us all rather charmed. He talked about growing up with his father, how he was a great teller of bedtime stories and an obsessive writer who set himself the near impossible target of never writing less than the previous day. He refuted the claim on the book jacket that his father could have left Nazi Germany. Fallada had two families there to support, Ditzen with his brother and mother installed in rural Mecklenburg, and his second wife and daughter in Berlin. He saw no way to leave without plunging them all into poverty and insecurity - as in fact happened to many writers in exile.
Ditzen also talked about how the book came about, based like all of his father's writing on fact. He was a little coy about the involvement of the writer Johannes R. Becher, at the time a member of the Communist Party Central Committee, in providing his father with the Gestapo case file on which the novel is based. I find it interesting that Alone in Berlin has been so enthusiastically received in Britain and the US, and I think one reason is that its author is untainted by political scandal in a way that almost all other German writers who tackled the subject of resistance to the Nazis weren't. In fact the book could be placed next to many others by East German writers who went on to get drawn into Cold War cultural policy. Anna Seghers, the writer of the outstanding The Seventh Cross and Transit, is just one case in point. After her return from Mexican exile, she became a functionary in the East German system and ended up making many questionable literary and political decisions in her later years. Fallada, of course, died in 1947, before the GDR was even founded.
The questions from the floor revealed how mixed the audience was - from Germans with perfect English who grew up with Fallada's children's books to new arrivals obviously (how shall I put this?) making their first acquaintance with German literature and history. Ditzen fielded them with aplomb, only answering the bits he wanted to and getting really rather flirtatious towards the end. He gave the impression of being a man with a strong mind who genuinely loved his father and still loves his work. And he highly recommended Fallada's Wolf Among Wolves about 1920s Germany - his best book, he told us. I bought the newly revamped English version, and found it was originally translated by Philip Owens with modern additions by Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs.
Ditzen then had to leave, but the evening was rounded off with more readings from the original and translation. All in all, it was a great success - standing room only, happy punters, books sold. I hope there'll be more opportunities to present translations from German in the Bookslut/Dialogue events series - which seems like a logical thing to do in Berlin – and I can well recommend their other readings too.
Sunday, 23 May 2010
The Observer Fails to Observe Michael Hofmann
It'd be funny, really, if it weren't quite so tragic. Today's Observer has an interesting piece by Dalya Alberge on the unexpected success of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin in the UK. Unexpected, of course, because the book is translated. And as everybody knows, nobody wants to read those nasty foreign books by people with unpronouncable names. Except that in this case, 100,000 people already have and Penguin is expecting to sell a whopping 250,000 copies.
The article ticks all the right boxes - talking to the British Centre for Literary Translation, bemoaning the lack of published translated fiction, etc. etc. And then Alberge fails to mention the small matter of the translator himself - Michael Hofmann, whose prose genuinely shines in the English version.
While the Observer's weekday sister paper the Guardian is clearly making an effort to credit translators in its reviews, it seems the Sunday journalists or editors haven't quite caught on. It's enough to make you bang your head against a wall, really it is.
The article ticks all the right boxes - talking to the British Centre for Literary Translation, bemoaning the lack of published translated fiction, etc. etc. And then Alberge fails to mention the small matter of the translator himself - Michael Hofmann, whose prose genuinely shines in the English version.
While the Observer's weekday sister paper the Guardian is clearly making an effort to credit translators in its reviews, it seems the Sunday journalists or editors haven't quite caught on. It's enough to make you bang your head against a wall, really it is.
Monday, 1 March 2010
Fallada and Walser Fuel the Passion
The Brits and the Americans do love a good dead white German or Swiss man. Right now, according to a tantalisingly vague press release in trade mag Buchreport, Hans Fallada is cleaning up in the UK. His Alone in Berlin (trans. Michael Hofmann) apparently sold 60,000 copies in a few weeks - almost unheard of for a translated title. It just goes to show what passionate marketing and a good story can do. Based on the real-life couple Elise and Otto Hampel, the book paints a less glamorous picture of anti-Nazi resistance than many readers may be familiar with. And the catchy British title is certainly a little more optimistic than the original Jeder stirbt für sich allein.
As Britain goes Fallada-crazy, Swiss dead guy Robert Walser is making waves in the States. As I've mentioned before, Susan Bernofsky's translation The Tanners is nominated for Best Translated Book - and you can listen to her reading and talking at the Center for the Art of Translation at the excellent Two Words blog.
Interestingly enough, the two writers have one other thing in common. Both have inspired paintings by Billy Childish: "Robert Walser dies in the snow" and "The Drinker".
As Britain goes Fallada-crazy, Swiss dead guy Robert Walser is making waves in the States. As I've mentioned before, Susan Bernofsky's translation The Tanners is nominated for Best Translated Book - and you can listen to her reading and talking at the Center for the Art of Translation at the excellent Two Words blog.
Interestingly enough, the two writers have one other thing in common. Both have inspired paintings by Billy Childish: "Robert Walser dies in the snow" and "The Drinker".
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