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Our Philosopher
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 heart-ened 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.
Luck
A child's-eye view of a family in decline, Luck combines humour and suspense with a heartbreaking pathos. This is the story of a nuclear family: father, mother, daughter and son. But all is not as it seems, for Mother is in love with Herr Herkenrath, and now father and son will have to leave home. Or will they? The mother sits in her room, squirting herself with perfume, waiting for her new man to arrive and her old one to go. Everyone makes their own luck in this life! she tells her children. The father sits in his room, planning another novel. Why doesn't his writing sell? Is it just bad luck? The little sister is the lucky one: she gets to stay at home. But maybe it's the son who is the lucky one: he gets to go. But will anybody really leave? Only time will tell, but time is running out. The removal van is on its way.
Our Conquest
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The Film Explainer
Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Award
Auf dem Turm
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The Parable of the Blind
A high-water mark of postwar German literature, a profoundly skeptical meditation on the fragility of human communities and the pitfalls and contradictions of making art. A knocking on the barn door drags us out of our sleep. No, the knocking isn't inside us, it's outside, where the other people are. With that, six blind beggars--ragged, profane, irascible--find themselves waking to yet another grim day in the dark. Today, however, something is different. Today these men have an appointment with a painter: they have been hired as models, to pose for Pieter Bruegel's grotesque masterpiece-in-the-making. With tremendous verbal ingenuity and black humor, Gert Hofmann's novel follows this tattered sextet's shambling progress across a landscape in 16th century Flanders, peopled by half-heard voices and unseen dangers, towards their ultimate encounter with the great, capricious artist, and (perhaps) their own immortality.
Gert Hofmann
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