Following the crushing defeat of the Italian army in 1917 by the Germans during World War I, the Villa belonging to the Spada family in Refrontolo, just north of Venice, is requisitioned by the German army and stripped of all its valuables. Crude victorious soldiers, drunk on their power, delight in tormenting the owners, tearing up cupboards and smashing the contents and even riding horses inside the Villa until they are stopped by officers in charge. The safety of young females is constantly at risk if they are caught out alone. As one character says, “War and loot are the only faithful married couple.” Living at the Villa which the family has occupied for generations, are the speaker, Paolo, age seventeen, an orphan who has lost his parents and other immediate family in the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in 1914; his grandfather Guglielmo Spada; grandmother Nancy; unmarried aunt, Donna Maria, who acts as the house manager; Teresa, the imaginative cook; and Loretta, her daughter, in her early twenties. Living in a house nearby are the red-haired Giulia Candiani, who has returned to her place of birth because of an indiscretion, a twenty-five-year-old who has bewitched Paolo; and her tenant, Grandma Spada’s “third paramour,” Pagnini, who occupies a basement room there. Author Andrea Molesini, who has lived in this area of northern Italy for much of his life, has absorbed every aspect of its history and is uniquely qualified to describe the effects of the German, and later, the Austro-Hungarian occupation on the lives of the inhabitants, not just of the Villa but of the surrounding area, during the final months of World War I.
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In his third book, the first to be published in English, German author Christopher Kloeble creates a thematically complex novel in which he examines the most crucial aspects of everyday life for several families over several generations as they try to figure out who they are and what their roles are within their own family histories and in the histories of others close to them. Though most thoughtful people reflect on their parents and siblings and their own roles within their families as part of their growing-up process, the relationships in this novel are not as clear-cut as they are in most readers’ lives. Even the question of who is your father or who is your mother does not inspire an automatic answer for some of the characters here. As Kloeble examines three generations of characters in two story lines, from the aftermath of World War I to the present, the exact nature of their connections is often hidden, not only from the reader but also from the characters themselves. During this novel, the author explores some of mankind’s most important themes in unique ways. Who are we as individuals (a question raised by Albert and sometimes Fred) exists alongside questions about who we are within our families and what is the role of love in our lives. What obligations, if any, do we have toward a new generation, and to what information is that new generation entitled by their elders? How, if at all, is the present a direct outgrowth of the past? As Albert begins to grow up and feel the stirrings of love and sex, he also experiences three serious loves, another complex theme well developed through the action, in addition to more platonic loves which teach him about humanity.
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In this marvelous combination of photographic portraits by famed German artist August Sander (1876 – 1964) and modern poems by American poet Adam Kirsch, which accompany them, Kirsch introduces readers to new worlds. Explaining the difference between “snapshots,” which record moments in time and bring back memories for the viewer, portraits like Sander’s, in which the subjects have no names and are identified only by “class, occupation, gender, [and] family role are independent of time and appear to posterity as types. Kirsch’s poems give imagined identities to these subjects, bringing them to life in new ways and connecting them directly with times and places at the same time that they maintain a universality that goes beyond the individual. Forty-six poems, all illustrated, provide a broad look at Germany’s people between 1910 and 1950.
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In a novel which ranges widely over almost three centuries of Russian history, author Andrei Makine, a Russian émigré who has lived in France since 1987, recreates the life of a young Russian author/filmmaker who finds that the concept of creativity in the world in which he lives must always bend to the will of someone else – the censors, a hired director, or the tastes of the public – if his work is to survive. In this metafictional novel Makine presents Oleg Erdmann as his author/main character, a man whose parents were originally from Germany. Oleg was born in Russia, but his father was unable to cope with the difficulties he faced as the head of an immigrant family in a country which did not admit him into its mainstream, and he spent most of his spare time escaping his personal problems by painstakingly creating a detailed model of a giant castle, elaborate and reminiscent of the castles from the eras of Peter the Great and his successors Whenever serious problems would arise in his daily life, his father would say, softly, “This is all happening to me because of that little German girl who became Catherine the Great.” Determined to write a screenplay about Catherine the Great years later, Oleg goes way beyond the limits of the usual biography, questioning not only Catherine’s life and her decisions but also the very nature of love and how one achieves it, using Catherine’s lengthy affairs with over a dozen men to expand the scope of his screenplay into a discussion of life, love, and art.
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Published in Germany in 1932, when author Irmgard Keun was only twenty-two, The Artificial Silk Girl, a bestselling novel of its day, is said to be for pre-Nazi Germany what Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) is for Jazz Age America. Both novels capture the frantic spirit, the eat-drink-and-be-merry ambiance, and the materialism of young people like Doris – and Lorelei Lee in the Loos book – who haunt the urban clubs as they try to work their way into a lifestyle much grander and more vibrant than anything their mothers could ever have hoped for. Doris, the “artificial silk girl,” has no politics, focusing almost completely on her own ambitions – finding wealthy men who will improve her life by financing a better lifestyle for her. She cadges a desired wristwatch from one potential suitor, extols the virtues of chocolates and fine clothing to others (and is sometimes rewarded), but fastens her clothing with rusty safety pins in case someone too unattractive gets too carried away. By the age of seventeen, she has already had a year-long affair with Hubert, her first and most lasting love, but when he ignores her birthday after she’s saved up for a new dress, and fails to produce a present, she retaliates. The authorities in Germany were not pleased with Keun’s published depiction of Berlin life as Hitler and the Nazis, preparing to take power, envisioned it. Within a year, Keun’s books were confiscated and all known copies were destroyed. Though she continued writing after World War II, it is this novel, rediscovered and republished in 1979, for which she is best known. Fun and funny and very important for its depiction of women in pre-Nazi society.
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