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), Italy (Bollati Boringhieri - published, rights reverted), Turkey (Yapi Kredi), Albania (Asdreni - published, rights reverted), Ukraine (Meduza)

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)

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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English world rights (The Aquarius Press/Quadrangle Books – published, rights reverted), Brazilian Portuguese rights (Trés Estrelas), France (Payot & Rivages – published, rights reverted), Italy (Einaudi), Sweden (Ersatz), Croatia (Disput), Greece (Agra)

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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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)

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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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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Die Notizen oder Von der unvoreiligen Versöhnung

Ludwig Hohl

The Notes

The Notes – the work of a »Montaigne of our time« – were written between 1934 and 1936, three years during which Hohl lived in the Netherlands in »greatest spiritual solitude«. Despite the short period of time in which the collection was written, it is a sum of his whole life and thinking.

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English world rights (Yale University Press), France (Editions L'Age d'Homme – published, rights reverted), Italy (Marcos y Marcos – published, rights reverted), Netherlands (De Prom – published, rights reverted), Japan (Koyoshobo), Hungary (Bookart), Bulgaria (Europa), Czech Republic (Opus)

Nuancen und Details

Ludwig Hohl

Nuances and Details

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Spanish world rights (DVD Ediciones – published, rights reverted), France (Editions de L'Aire – published, rights reverted)

Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter

Anselm Kiefer, Klaus Dermutz

Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter

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English world rights (Seagull), Chinese simplex rights (The Commercial Press)

Notizbücher

Anselm Kiefer

Notebooks

This great artist is also a great writer. Anselm Kiefer’s Notebooks reveal his strong affinity to language and let the reader witness the process of how thoughts, experiences and adventures are slowly being transformed into visual art.

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English world rights (Seagull)

Ausgewiesen

Bei Ling

Exiled

»My home is no longer China. My home is the Chinese language.«

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