Levy’s Testament

Novel
Levy’s Testament / Levys Testament
Novel
Shortlisted for the Wilhelm-Raabe-Literaturpreis 2021

Selected for New Books in German – translation funding guaranteed

A story of love and loss and a journey through 1970s left-wing Europe

They meet in Berlin but in London they become a couple. They spend their days in a court room at the Old Bailey, to support anarchists facing draconian prison sentences. Strikes, squatting, IRA attacks and the tough measures taken by the government shape everyday life in the winter of 1972. The couple explore the city, floating through it weightlessly as though in a dream. The Englishman (as the narrator calls her companion) knows little about his Jewish family. Decades later, after they...

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They meet in Berlin but in London they become a couple. They spend their days in a court room at the Old Bailey, to support anarchists facing draconian prison sentences. Strikes, squatting, IRA attacks and the tough measures taken by the government shape everyday life in the winter of 1972. The couple explore the city, floating through it weightlessly as though in a dream. The Englishman (as the narrator calls her companion) knows little about his Jewish family. Decades later, after they have already been separated for many years, the Englishman uncovers a family drama. It takes him back to the Old Bailey: to 1924, to a spectacular fraud case, in which the accused is Levy, his great-grandfather.


Following the restless search of her companion, encouraging it with her questions, the narrator stumbles upon the inscrutable workings of history, which connects the remotest episodes of our life. Their quiet, prosaic, adamant sound is what makes Ulrike Edschmid’s novels unique. In Levy’s Testament the lover turns into a chronicler and the intimacy of emotion into an instrument of cognizance.

»Her books are slim volumes. But they have an enormous impact.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»You won't want to put this slim, intense book down until the very last page ...« Christoph Schröder, ZEIT Online

»Edschmid works with the suggestive power of historical indices, her style combines reportage and fiction. The constant shifts between present tense and past tense create a special kind of hyper-realistic perception that does justice to the individual case and yet goes far beyond it.« Meike Fessmann, Der Tagesspiegel

»Thanks to Edschmid's intense but sober narration, the 49 episodes appear before the reader’s eyes like film stills.« Christoph Schröder, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Page by page the story keeps getting more and more fascinating.« Hannah Bethke, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Levy's Testament is a moving book in which Ulrike Edschmid tells a biography whose importance transcends the individual with great sensitivity.« Fokke Joel, neues deutschland

»A memoir that maintains a distance to reality and gets under the reader’s skin.« BÜCHERmagazin

»Her books are slim volumes. But they have an enormous impact.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»You won't want to put this slim, intense book down until the very last page ...« Christoph Schröder, ZEIT Online

»Edschmid works with the suggestive power of historical indices, her style combines reportage and fiction. The constant shifts between present tense and past tense create a special kind of hyper-realistic...

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2021, 144 pages

Persons

Ulrike Edschmid, born in 1940, pursued literary studies in Berlin and Frankfurt and studied at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, where she still lives today. She writes prose and literary non-fiction and is also famous for her art. She was, among other prizes, awarded the Grimmelshausen Prize in 2013, the Cotta Prize for her lifework in 2014, and the Günter Grass Prize in 2021.

Ulrike Edschmid, born in 1940, pursued literary studies in Berlin and Frankfurt and studied at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin,...


OTHER PUBLICATIONS

The Last Patient
Year of Publication: 2024
Ulrike EdschmidYear of Publication: 2024
She sat at the kitchen table, smoking, exuding a »seductive world-weariness reminiscent of the films of the Nouvelle Vague«. Having been left by a man, she turns up in the narrator’s share house in Frankfurt in 1973 looking for a room. She was majoring in history and French. Three years later, after falling in love with a Spanish anarchist, she follows him to Barcelona.

After a few...
A Man Who Falls
Year of Publication: 2017
Ulrike EdschmidYear of Publication: 2017

Summer 1986. Berlin-Charlottenburg. A man climbs up onto a ladder to paint the ceiling of a flat in a turn-of-the-century building he intends to move into with his partner. He loses his balance and falls. Afterwards, nothing at all is like it was. Little else could have shattered the life of two people at the beginning of their future together in such a brutal way. But what at first seems like...

The Disappearance of Philip S.
Year of Publication: 2013
Ulrike EdschmidYear of Publication: 2013
In her novel The Disappearance of Philip S., Ulrike Edschmid thinks back to the years spent with Philip S., a young man from a wealthy Swiss family. The two met in the crucible of Berlin...
Rights sold to:

France (Piranha), Denmark (Vandkunsten)

Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Italy (e/o), Turkey (Aylak Adam)

My Mother's Lovers
Year of Publication: 2006
Ulrike EdschmidYear of Publication: 2006
Lovers come and go when their time is up. Her mother’s first husband was killed in the war, and the narrator has no memory of her father. A lonely castle becomes a refuge not only for the mother, who takes on weaving work to support her children, but also for people in the areas who have lost their roots. This unusually calm woman does not allow life’s adversities to make her bitter, but has the...

DISCOVER

News
11.05.2022
We congratulate our author Ulrike Edschmid.
News
08.09.2021
We are delighted that Ulrike Edschmid's novel Levy’s Testament has been shortlisted for the Wilhelm-Raabe-Literaturpreis 2021.