A child's eye view of a family in decline, "Luck" combines humour, suspense and pathos. This is the story of a nuclear family - father, mother, daughter and son. But all is not as it seems. Mother is in love with Herr Herkenrath and now father and son must leave home.
Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Einstein – all praised the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession, and an aphorist and satirist on the sly. In Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, novelist Gert Hofmann weaves a wondrous fictionalized tale of Lichtenberg’s real-life romance with “the model of beauty and sweetness,” Maria Stechard, a flower seller he meets one day near his laboratory in Gottingen. “The greater part of what I commit to paper is untrue, and the best of it is nonsense!” says Lichtenberg, our hunchbacked hero. His daily life of “wrestling with death,” of electricity machines and exploding gases, is plunged into new passion the day he encounters the Stechardess: “Something is found that was lost for a long time.” Soon he teaches her to read and write, she helps him keep house… and then? Colored with Lichtenberg’s boisterous, enlightening meditations on life, death and everything in-between, this stunning fable-of-awakening was described by The Washington Post as “a quiet and convincing description of human happiness… a fine and original book.”
A powerful novel about prejudice, violence, and complicity in Nazi Germany, this spare and evocative work interrogates shows how a group of people can slip towards extremism and barbarity in the blink of an eye. The time is the 1930s. Our philosopher is Herr Veilchenfeld, a renowned thinker and distinguished professor, who, after his sudden dismissal from the university, has retired to live quietly in a country town in the east of Germany. Our narrator is Hans, a clever and inquisitive boy. He relates a mix of things he witnesses himself and things he hears about from his father, the town doctor, who sees all sorts of people as he makes his rounds, even Veilchenfeld, with his troubled heart. Veilchenfeld is in decline, it's true--he keeps ever more to himself--but the town is in ever better shape. After the defeat of the Great War and the subsequent years of poverty, things are looking up. The old, worn people are heartened to see it. The young are exhilarated. It is up to them to promote and patrol this new uplifting reality--to make it safe from the likes of Veilchenfeld, whose very existence is an affront to it. And so the doctor listens, and young Hans looks on.
The first English translation of a classic novel first published in Germany in 1986 and described as 'One of the best Holocaust novels in postwar German literature"
Was ist dem sehr kleinen, buckligen Mann mit dem gro?en Kopf und den d?nnen Beinen ?jenseits der Wissenschaft? durch den Kopf gegangen, und wie m?gen seine Hoffnungen und dann sein Gl?ck ausgesehen haben, als die dreiundzwanzig Jahre j?ngere Maria Dorothea Stechard bei Nacht und Nebel in das Lichtenbergsche Haus zog, um bei dem Gelehrten nach dem Rechten zu sehen?
