German and European Studies Edited by John Zilcosky University of Toronto Press 336pp

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Literature and Censorship in Restoration Germany
Repression and Rhetoric
Katy Heady

In 1819, the German Confederation promulgated the infamous “Carlsbad Decrees,” establishing censorship standards aimed at thwarting the political aspirations of post-Napoleonic Germany’s rapidly emerging public sphere. This most comprehensive system of state censorship to that point in German lands remained in place until the revolutions of 1848, and is widely acknowledged to have had a profound influence on public discourse. However, although censorship during the period has been the object of much scholarly interest, little is known about its precise effects on literary writing. This book redresses that situation through detailed studies of six works composed and published in different parts of the Confederation by three prominent writers: Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Heinrich Heine, and Franz Grillparzer. By analyzing successive versions of these works, the study illustrates the thematic, linguistic, and aesthetic constraints censorship placed upon their writing, as well as the variety of literary evasion strategies that it stimulated. It demonstrates that while censorship inhibited and distorted German literary writing, it also led to the emergence of distinctively complex and inventive modes of literary expression that came to mark the epoch.
Katy Heady received her PhD in German from the University of Sheffield in 2007.

Contents
1 Sex, Religion and Violence: Christian Dietrich Grabbe’s Herzog Theodor von Gothland
2 The Denomination of the Devil: Christian Dietrick Grabbe’s Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung
3 “Was soll ich nicht sagen?”: Heinrich Heine’s Briefe aus Berlin
4 Smuggling or Stalemate?: Heinrich Heine’s Reise von München nach Genua
5 Too Nice a King for the People?: Franz Grillparzer’s König Ottokars Glück und Ende
6 The Artist Fights Back: Franz Grillparzer’s Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen
7 Conclusion
8 Bibliography
9 Index
Publisher’s website

Title:         Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique

Author:     Gert Jonke

Translator:    Jean M. Snook

Publishing Date: Fall 2008

Publisher:    Dalkey Archive Press

Description:    This bizarre, lyrical romp of a novel begins with two wealthy siblings preparing their estate for their annual garden party, to which they’ve invited “several artists and above all many of the people variously involved in the further development of intellectual life.” The first sign that this year’s party will be a little different is that the siblings have had paintings made of every inch of their garden, and are hanging the paintings in place of the garden itself. We soon learn that this is just the beginning: the siblings have decreed that this year’s party will be an exact repetition of the party they held last year. Everyone will say and do exactly the same things, whether they’d like to or not . . . Welcome to the world of Gert Jonke, the latest in a line of great philosophical comedians from Calvino and Walser back through Flaubert, Diderot, and Rabelais.

Reviews:    Starred review in Publishers Weekly, 8/18/2008:
“Austrian author and playwright Jonke addresses a host of existential questions through a cast of vaudevillian compatriots in this slim, beautifully written volume. . . . As intricately structured as a musical composition, with recurring conversational motifs, the narrative—powered by Snook’s magnificent translation—moves smoothly and evocatively through fraught emotional terrain.”

Reviewed by Paul Griffiths on 16/01/2009 at <www.readysteadybook.com/BookReview.aspx?isbn=1564785017>: “Perhaps everyone is asleep in this bizarre tale, though there is nothing dreamy about Jonke’s language (as translated by Jean M. Snook), which is clear and exact, even when evoking the mysterious, magical music the narrator finds emanating from a pond in Diabelli’s garden.”

Reviewed by Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA). Amazon.com: Customer Reviews. December 9, 2008.
“Hilarious in its approach and masterfully translated by Jean M. Snook, Homage to Czerny is highly recommended and riveting reading from one of Austria’s best.”

Title:         Kahn & Engelmann. A Novel

Author:     Hans Eichner

Translator:     Jean M. Snook, translation funded by the Canada Council for the Arts

Publishing Date: April 2009

Publisher:     Biblioasis

Cover photo:     “Still Life #72” by D.R. Cowles

Description:     Kahn & Engelmann tells the story of a Jewish family from rural Hungary, their immigration to Vienna in the great days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their loves, business ventures and failings and their eventual tragic destruction, recreating a vanished Vienna with humour and humanity.

Reviews:     “On April 8, 2009, Hans Eichner died in his sleep. Three days later the first print run of Kahn & Engelmann, in its luminous new translation by Jean M. Snook, arrived from the printer.”
Paul Wells in Maclean’s, May 11, 2009, page 64.

“Hans Eichner, who died shortly before this translation was published, may have written the last great pan-European novel.”
Chris Scott in The Globe and Mail, Monday, July 13, 2009, The Daily Review.

The German Book Office chose Kahn & Engelmann as its June book pick, 2009.

“The book itself is a beautiful piece of work. Canadian publishers Biblioasis have done what’s often considered unthinkable and credited the translator, Jean M. Snook, on the front cover – hats off for that. But hats off too to the seemingly faultless translation, with not a single stumbling block, glaring misunderstanding or unwitting germanism. It seems that the translator worked in close collaboration with the late author, and that has paid off marvellously.”
Katy Derbyshire in love german books, Friday, 24 July 2009.

Title:
Everybody Talks about the Weather (We Don’t): The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof
Authors:
Ulrike Meinhof Ed. and introduction by Karin Bauer (McGill) Preface by Elfriede Jelinek Afterword by Bettina Röhl Translated by Luise von Flotow

Description:No other figure embodies revolutionary politics and radical chic quite like Ulrike Meinhof. In the 1960s, she was known in Europe as a public intellectual, leading a glamorous life in Hamburg with her publisher husband and twin daughters. Ten years later, Meinhof gave it all up to form, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, notorious for its bombings, bank robberies, and kidnappings of the wealthy. What impels someone to abandon middle-class privilege for the sake of revolution? Meinhof, who spent the 1960s writing a column for a popular leftist magazine, began to see the world in increasingly stark terms: the United States was emerging as an unstoppable superpower, massacring a tiny country overseas despite increasingly popular dissent at home, and Germany appeared to be run by former Nazis. Never before translated into English, Meinhof’s 1960s writings show a woman in transition, reflecting upon the major political events and social currents of her time. An essay by Karin Bauer contextualizes Meinhof’s writings and her mesmerizing life story. A relentless critic of her mother and of the Left, Bettina Röhl, one of Meinhof’s daughters, contributes a brief afterword that shows how Meinhof’s ghost still haunts us today.