Notebooks & Conversations

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Traumprotokolle

Theodor W. Adorno

Dream Protocols

In early January 1956, Adorno noted: »Our dreams are not simply connected to one another by virtue of being ›ours‹ but also because they form a continuum, belong to a consistent world, similar to the way that all of Kafka’s short stories work to the same effect. And the more interconnected our dreams are, or the more they repeat themselves, the greater the danger that we might no longer be able to distinguish them from reality.«

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English world rights (Polity Press), Spanish world rights (Akal), France (Stock), Sweden (Nirstedt), Turkey (Yapi Kredi), Ukraine (Meduza); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Italy (Bollati Boringhieri), Albania (Asdreni)

Briefe und Briefwechsel

Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer

Correspondence 1923-1966

Among the great letter exchanges, the one between Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer is certainly the most intimate.

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English world rights (Polity), Spanish world rights (Cuarenta), France (Bord De L'Eau)

Kleines Lexikon intimer Städte

Juri Andruchowytsch

Small Encyclopedia of Intimate Cities

Juri Andruchowytsch has invested a lot of time in familiarising himself with foreign cities. In some of them, he got stuck for a while. Others have become true parts of his life: »Munich begins right behind Moscow, the alphabet is in harmony with time« – that’s because Munich was the first German city the young author from the failing Soviet Union visited in order to write his Moscoviada not far from it, at Lake Starnberg.

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France (Noir sur Blanc), Croatia (Fraktura)

Kriegstagebuch

Ingeborg Bachmann

War Diary

The present volume for the first time compiles the war diary Ingeborg Bachmann kept from late summer 1944 to June 1945, as well as the surviving letters from Jack Hamesh – a unique document of dialogue between the children of the victims and the perpetrators.

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English world rights (Seagull), Spanish world rights (Akal), France (Actes Sud), Italy (Adelphi), Poland (Czarne), Czech Republic (Pulchra), Ukraine (Osnovy), Israel (Hakkibutz Hameuchad – Sifriyat Poalim)

Domestic Rights Sales: Audiobook rights (Audiobuch)

Das Dritte Reich des Traums

Charlotte Beradt

The Third Reich of Dreams

Charlotte Beradt, who had worked as a journalist in Berlin until, from 1933 onwards, she was no longer employed, fled to England in 1939 and then to New York in 1940. She collected dreams that had occurred between the years of 1933 and 1939 by asking the people surrounding her to retell them: her seamstress, a neighbour, her aunt, the milkman, an entrepreneur friend, a physician… Fifty of those »dreams dictated by dictatorship« were included in The Third Reich of Dreams, her classic work of dream documentation first published in 1966.

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Spanish rights/Latin America (Lom ediciones), Brazilian Portuguese rights (Trés Estrelas), Italy (Meltemi), Sweden (Ersatz), Greece (Agra); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (The Aquarius Press/Quadrangle Books), France (Payot & Rivages), Croatia (Disput)

Der Leser. Das Erzählen

Peter Bichsel

The Reader. The Story

Peter Bichsel‘s five lectures from 1982 are not actually lectures but stories about lectures. They are refreshingly unpretentious and always exceedingly subtle – just as his works of fiction. At the same time, they seem to consist of nothing but digressions, of small stories, very amusing and simultaneously serious, stories about literature and about readers. Mainly about readers, whom Peter Bichsel loves, no matter what they read.

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Turkey (Ketebe); previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Italy (Comma 22), Denmark (Gyldendal), Sweden (Janus), Croatia (Naklada MD)

Handstreiche

Volker Braun

Coup

Considering contemporary conditions, what possibilities does a writer have of effecting change? On intimate terms with all literary traditions, Volker Braun makes use of tried and tested prose forms to come closer to an answer: aphorisms, pieces of dialogue, quotes. In his workshop dreams, puzzling fragments, and stubborn truths all come to light.

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Verlagerung des geheimen Punkts

Volker Braun

Relocating the Secret Point

Relocating the Secret Point gathers underground texts and speeches. The collection opens with a satire of expatriation written in January 1977 and is followed by the radical pamphlet Büchner’s Letters; it contains essays on Shakespeare and Rimbaud, Goethe and Kafka: poetry and politics, and points to a shift in the work that will grow into a radical change.

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»Notstandsgesetze von Deiner Hand«

Gudrun Ensslin, Bernward Vesper

»Emergency Laws by Your Hand«

At the beginning of 1968, Gudrun Ensslin left Bernward Vesper and moved with her 7-month-old son Felix to Andreas Baader. Shortly thereafter, two department stores in Frankfurt burned; Baader, Ensslin and Thorwald Proll were arrested as suspected arsonists. Felix went with Vesper and the history of the Red Army Faction (RAF) began to take its course.

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Fallobst

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Windfalls

»How’s the confidence of the financial astrologers doing? What does the gibberish of the daily papers tell us? How much reality is contained in the mythical models of contemporary physics and cosmology? Towards which ultimate goal is our contemporaries’ pathological mobility drifting? What is the ubiquitous craze for abbreviations hiding? And down which garden path are the fine arts trying to lead us?« As shrewd as he is wise, the author does not claim that his answers to these questions are fruit off the tree of absolute knowledge. »Windfalls« is what he calls them, »which have been collected in various big and small baskets.«

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Fragebogen

Max Frisch

Questionnaire

For the first time with three newly discovered, thus far unpublished questionnaires (on the topics of technology, alcohol and ethics)

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Denmark (Basilisk), Sweden (Faethon), Turkey (Yapi Kredi), Georgia (Sulakauri)
Domestic Rights Sales: German Book Club (Büchergilde Gutenberg)

Ignoranz als Staatsschutz?

Max Frisch

Ignorance as State Security?

In his final typescript, in a deeply personal way and in a novel literary form, Max Frisch engaged with the national scandal that rocked Switzerland in 1989 and 1990: almost a million Swiss citizens had been under State surveillance during the Cold War. On individualised index cards or »fiches« the Attorney General’s Office created a chronicle of suspicion, whose grotesque banality served only to exacerbate the scandal.

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Questionnaire

Max Frisch

Questionnaire

»Do you consider yourself to be a good friend? Are you a good friend to yourself?« Twenty-three questions on the subject of friendship lie between these two queries. Max Frisch’s famous questionnaire stems from the ‘Diary 1966-1971’, and each of the ten questionnaires covers a subject, such as marriage, women, humour, money, friendship, fatherhood, Heimat, ownership and nothing less than the preservation of mankind. The answers are left to the reader’s imagination and encourage contemplation and discussion.

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Denmark (Basilisk), Sweden (Faethon)

Haupt- und Nebensätze

Hermann L. Gremliza

Thoughts and Afterthoughts

»In dubio contra« is what Gremliza signed to the reader’s copy of an anthology for which he had written a profile on Helmut Schmidt entitled »Rechts, wo der Blinddarm ist« in 1967. For forty years, Hermann L. Gremliza has been lashing out against everything that abases people: capitalism, the German Vaterland, its anti-Semites and racists: »There is no other, better Germany. What we have are Germans and a few people who also live in the vicinity.«

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Aus der Traum (Kartei)

Durs Grünbein

From the Dream (Files)

The title of a book of poetry could not be any more provocative, and still the poet allows no room for doubt: »In general, that which we call reality is greatly overestimated.« Therefore, with all the power of his imagination, in the first half of his book he leads us into the stormy areas of that reality which most people consider the measure of all things.

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Das Gewicht der Welt

Peter Handke

The Weight of the World

»A combination of professional notebook and personal diary that records – both in short, informal jottings and through more formal, extended meditations – the details of Handke's daily life in Paris from November 1975 through March 1977. Along with references to such mentors as Truffaut, John Cowper Powys, Robert DeNiro and Goethe, the journal recounts Handke's passing impressions of strangers; the deep and delicate nature of his relationship with his daughter; and a brief hospital stay which stirs his ever-present fear of death.« (book description from the US edition by FSG)

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USA & Canada (FSG), Spanish world rights (Adriana Hidalgo), Arabic world rights (Al Arabi), France (Gallimard), Italy (Ugo Guanda)

Tage und Werke

Peter Handke

Days and Works

In 2013, quietly and in solitude, Peter Handke celebrated his vocational anniversary: in June 1963 he became certain that »writing, taking notes, drawing connections, and leaving things disconnected would be a possible vocation for me«.

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Italy (Guanda)

Nebeneingang oder Haupteingang?

Peter Handke, Thomas Oberender

Side Entrance or Main Entrance?

Peter Handke and Thomas Oberender recount the impressive history of Handke’s oeuvre in theatre, a life’s work that is incomparable »in regards to formal beauty and brilliant reflection«, as the jury declares in its explanatory statement for bestowing the International Ibsen Award 2014 upon Handke. Oberender asks as one with profound expertise in matters of the stage and as a sensitive reader; he provides prompts for an inspiring dialogue on Handke’s literary influences, on developments and continuities in the work of this great epic poet of contemporary theatre.

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Aus Hitlers Berlin

Felix Hartlaub

From Hitler’s Berlin

Not only in his War Notebooks from Paris did Felix Hartlaub laconically detail the deformations of life that National Socialism brought in its wake. Already as a student in »Hitler’s Berlin« between the years of 1934 and 1938 he had refined his talent for revealing inconspicuous scenes of daily life, for showing how nothing at all was any longer how it had been.

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»In den eigenen Umriss gebannt«

Felix Hartlaub

»Captured in one’s owen silhouette«

Felix Hartlaub (1913-1945), a unique figure of German literature, belongs to the young generation who began writing towads the end of the Weimar Republic and under the dictatorship of National Socialism. His legacy consists mainly of the »War Notebooks«, which were created after the young historian was delegated to German-occupied Paris and later in various locations of the restricted area around the Führer Headquarters, Department for War Diaries. These fragments belong to the most precise, sensitive and densest messages in the German language that have reached us from the years of World War II. This edition, focused on the years between 1939 and 1945, presents works and letters in reliable text form accompanied by exhaustive explanatory annotation.

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Czech Republic (selection, Volox Globator)

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