At the festival from 4.-16. October 2010 young artists develop and discuss contemporary dance....
more
Herta Müller: "Everything I Own I Carry with Me" (Atemschaukel) Novel.
Carl Hanser Verlag
English excerpt
The book: After many years, Herta Müller presents her new novel – a powerfully lyrical account of the fate of the Transylvanian Saxons – the ‘Siebenbürgener’– through the life story of a young man in the Russian Gulags.
Romania at the end of WWII, and the German section of the population lives in constant fear. 'It was 15th January 1945, at 3 am, when the patrol came for me. It was already minus 15 degrees and the temperature was dropping steadily. This is the beginning of the young man’s story; his grandmother's last words to him are I know you'll return.
A truck takes him to the holding camp before he begins the long journey to Russia. 'The words I know you’ll return would become my heart’s accomplice and my comrade-in-arms against hunger. Because I did return, I can say this: words such as these can keep you alive.'
Herta Müller's superb new novel tells of a harrowing experience which will leave an indelible stamp on its survivor for the rest of his life. Her book stems from interviews with the poet Oskar Pastior (who was imprisoned from 1945 to 1949) and other Gulag survivors.
(Here you can read and hear some poems by Pastior and by Müller) 
The author: Herta Müller was born in Nitzkydorf, Romania in 1953. She lives in Berlin. Her works have won her numerous awards, among them the Impac Dublin Literary Award in 1998. Previous publications at Hanser include Der König verneigt sich und tötet (2003), Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen (2005), Herztier (revised edition 2007), and Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (revised edition 2009). Update 8 Oct 2009: Herta Müller has been named by the Swedish Academy as the winner of the 2009 Nobel prize for literature
Photo © Annette Pohnert / Carl Hanser Verlag
RSS
Former East-German novelist Christa Wolf has spent a lifetime writing against forgetting and the repression of guilt. But the will to remember, it seems, has not been enough to prevent her from doing exactly that. Her biographer Jörg Magenau reviews her new autobiographical novel "Stadt der Engel", which ends in Death Valley. Perhaps 'dead end' would have been more to the point. Photo:©Susanne Schleyer
The Austrian writer Josef Haslinger talks about his sexual encounters with paedophile priests as a boy in a Catholic boarding school. Instead of joining the chorus of moral outrage, he acknowledges the full spectrum of feelings that these episodes provoked, and argues that simple criminalisation is not the way forward.
Since its publication in January, Helene Hegemann's novel "Axolotl Roadkill" has been at the centre of a debate whose vagaries of terminology have allowed the seriousness of the case to be downplayed. Philipp Theisohn wishes the literary establishment would drop all its talk of intertextuality in favour of a more democratic category: plagiarism.
UPDATE: The German Book Prize 2009 has been awarded to Katrin Schmidt for her novel "You're Not Going to Die". Read excerpts from all the shortlisted titles - including one from the Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller's novel "Everything I Own I Carry With Me".
Günter Grass has just published his diary from 1990, recording the tumultous events after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "From Germany to Germany" is a list of ominous predictions for the future of German unity. The former GDR writer Monika Maron looks at how blinded Grass was by his own preconceptions.
This year Turkey was the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We introduce the books that attracted the most critical attention.
and all the best for 2009!
This year's prestigious Büchner Prize went to Austrian writer Josef Winkler. He talks to Paul Jandl about dung heaps, patriarchs, the fear of speechlessness and the elegance of John Paul II's coffin. Photo © Jerry Bauer / SV