Art Metropole

#13281

Georg

Translator

Carl Skoggard

Writer

Siegfried Kracauer

Date

2016

Publisher

Publication Studio Hudson

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

978-1-62462-140-6

Size

13 × 20.2 × 1.8 cm

Length

381 pp

Genre

Fiction

Best remembered today for his exploration of early German cinema (From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film), Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) was the editor for cultural affairs at Germany’s leading liberal newspaper during the Weimar Republic until its disastrous end. His Georg is a panorama of those years as seen through the eyes of a rookie reporter working for the fictional Morgenbote (“Morning Herald”). In a defeated nation seething with extremism right and left, young Georg is looking for something to believe in. For him, the past has become unusable; for nearly everyone he meets, paradise seems just around the corner. But which paradise? Kracauer’s grimly funny novel takes on a confused and dangerous time which can remind us of our own. The style is briskly cinematic.

Translator Carl Skoggard enjoys reading German literature and for many years was an editor for the Repértoire International de la Littérature Musicale, with responsibility for German materials. His translation of Ein Jahr in Arkadien, an 1805 gay fiction by the eccentric Duke August of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg, appeared as Year in Arcadia (Atropen Verlag) in 1999. Skoggard has also produced translations and commentaries for Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood circa 1900); Berliner Chronik (The ‘Berlin Chronicle’ Notices); and all of Benjamin’s little known 73 “Heinle sonnets,” along with the original German and line-by-line commentary. Previously he served as staff writer for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors.

This item originated from: Pilot Editions