Franz Fühmann was a German writer active in East Germany, known for his diverse literary output including short stories, essays, screenplays, and children's books. His work often delved into profound existential questions, exploring the complexities of human identity. Fühmann possessed a distinctive ability to weave together epic scope with intimate character psychology, securing his significant place in German literature.
The exploration of the lives of poet Georg Trakl and author Franz Fühmann reveals a deep engagement with the struggles of a turbulent century. Fühmann reflects on his own vulnerabilities to ideologies like Nazism and socialism, using Trakl's poetry as a means of resistance and understanding. The work examines the complexities of human existence, transcending simplistic ideologies to embrace the full spectrum of life’s experiences. Awarded the Scholl Siblings Prize in 1982, this poignant narrative remains relevant in today's climate of political extremism.
Four classical Greek myths retold with unexpected twists by an East German dissident. Franz Fühmann's subversive retellings of four Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In them, Fühmann plumbs the ancient tales' depths and makes them his own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power. In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while "Hera and Zeus" probes the divine couple's tumultuous relationship and its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war. Fühmann's unflinching account of Marsyas' flaying by Apollo has been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fühmann's shimmering prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee's exquisite collages.
Each story presents a snapshot of a personal and historical turning point in
the life of the narrator, beginning with childhood anti-Semitism and moving to
a youthful embrace-and then an ultimate rejection-of Nazi ideology.
When a young reader once asked Franz F hmann if he considered his work to be science fiction, he was quick to deny it: he wanted nothing to do with the genre. As he began writing the stories that make up this volume, however, he found himself coming around to the idea of a hybrid genre--what he calls in German Sai ns-Fiktschen, 'science fiktion' with a k. In seven interlocking stories, Science Fiktion offers a steampunk takedown of the logic of the Cold War. In this imagined future, two nations compete for global dominance: Uniterr, an exaggeration of the Eastern Bloc, in which personal freedom is curtailed and life regulated with cartoonish strictness; and Libroterr, in which the decadence of the West has been pushed beyond all reason. The stories follow three young citizens of Uniterr: Jirro, a young neutrinologist whose life is forever changed by a year spent abroad in Libroterr; Janno, a causologist condemned to a life of mediocrity in Uniterr's bureacracy for the briefest of impure thoughts; and Pavlo, an inventor and a drunkard, whose mind pushes against the limits of what his world allows. Through these three lives, F hmann gradually unfolds the contours of their bizarre world in a master class of understated world making. As the reader is swept up in the madness of Libroterr's predator ads (which grab you on the street) and Uniterr's mandatory mind readings, F hmann's dark comedy from the last century comes to seem all the more prescient in ours. A German twist on an Anglophone tradition, Science Fiktion provides a disturbing vision of the future from the other side of the Berlin Wall.
This work is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, 'The Jew Car', left off, Fühmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions - Nazism, then socialism - and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses.
