pp xi139 June 2004
paperback ISBN 0-7083-1716-2
hardback ISBN 0-7083-1715-4
Hans-Ulrich Treichel has quickly developed a literary reputation in Germany for writing which is readable, humorous and yet challenging. He enjoyed huge popular and critical success with the publication of his first major prose work, Der Verlorene (translated into English as Lost), in 1998. This work is a poignant re-working of an experience through which Treichel’s own family went towards the end of the Second World War. Since Der Verlorene his career has developed through a series of prose works and novels which combine an acute sense of time and place with appealing comic irony (Tristanakkord, Der irdische Amor, Heimatkunde, among others). It was as a poet that he first began to write, however, and his anthologies of poetry have enjoyed renewed success as a result of his rise to fame as one of Germany’s leading prose writers. Hans-Ulrich Treichel is also an academic and has published widely on German literature of the modern period. He is currently director of the Deutsche Literaturinstitut in Leipzig.
This volume is the first book to be devoted exclusively to Hans-Ulrich Treichel and is intended both as an introduction for the general reader and as a resource for the specialist. It begins with a series of poems by the author himself and an interview held during his visit to the Centre for Contemporary German Literature in Swansea. The critical essays which follow offer an overview of the author’s works, as well as analysis of specific aspects of his major prose publications. The volume concludes with a full bibliography.
Hans-Ulrich Treichel zählt zu den bedeutendsten und erfolgreichsten Autoren der neuen Generation in Deutschland. Neben fünf Aufsätzen britischer und deutscher Germanisten enthält dieser Band neue Gedichte von Treichel sowie die Abschrift eines bisher unveröffentlichten Gesprächs mit dem Schriftsteller. Die Aufsätze bieten sowohl einen Überblick über Treichels literarische Karriere als auch detaillerte Analysen seiner Texte. Der Band wird durch eine umfassende Bibliographie zur Primär- und Sekundärliteratur ergänzt.
Contents
List of contributors
Preface
Abbreviations
Contemporary German Writers
Each volume of the Contemporary German Writers series is devoted to an author who has spent a period as Visiting Writer at the Centre for Contemporary German Literature in the Department of German at the University of Wales Swansea. The first chapter in each volume contains an original, previously unpublished piece by the writer concerned; the second consists of a biographical sketch, outlining the main events of the author’s life and setting the works in context, particularly for the non-specialist or general reader. A third chapter will, in each case, contain an interview with the author, normally conducted during the writer’s stay in Swansea. Subsequent chapters will contain contributions by invited British and German academics and critics on aspects of the writer’s œuvre. While each volume will seek to provide both an overview of the author and some detailed analysis of individual works, the nature of that critical engagement will inevitably depend on the relative importance of the author concerned and on the amount of critical material which his or her work has previously inspired. Each volume includes an extensive bibliography designed to fill any gaps or remedy deficiencies in existing bibliographies. The
intention is to produce in each case a book which will serve both as an introduction to the writer concerned and as a resource for specialists in contemporary German literature.
Hans-Ulrich Treichel
The current volume begins with nine previously unpublished poems by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, which include reflections on the author’s childhood, on his personal development and on his family history. There follows a biographical sketch and an interview with Treichel which, as well as addressing each of his major publications, sheds light on the origins of his literary career and on the relationship between creative writing and academic
work. The interview is followed by a survey of the whole of Treichel’s career by the noted literary critic Stephan Reinhardt, who values in particular the author’s theory-free ‘Sinn für Affekte und Effekte’. David Basker then focuses on the presentation of geographical setting in Treichel’s prose works, identifying the sense of being out of place in one’s environment as a fundamental creative impulse. There follow three chapters focusing on specific works. David Clarke examines the presentation of guilt and shame in
Der Verlorene and argues that, while these emotional conditions are common to all three protagonists, the experiences which trigger them are different. Treichel’s book thus calls into question the roles of these emotions in creating a unified national response to the trauma of the past. Stuart Taberner takes as the starting point for his analysis of
Tristanakkord the tendency in reviews and secondary literature to highlight comparisons between Treichel and other contemporary German writers, most notably Martin Walser. The chapter argues that in
Tristanakkord Treichel successfully challenges one-dimensional cultural globalisation, without falling into a conservative appeal to the notion of a supposedly authentic German
Heimat as an antidote to the rootlessness of modern society. In this he is most obviously different from Martin Walser. Rhys Williams then examines
Der irdische Amor, identifying the significance of Caravaggio as a topic of study for the protagonist Albert and for the novel as a whole, while analysing the mechanics of Treichel’s comic vision. As in previous volumes, the final chapter comprises a detailed bibliography.