A lot of these books were things I read to write about in my own book. The full reading list for it is here.
A Granite Silence– Nina Allan
Nina Allan tries a different approach from her normal literary sci-fi work, and does a meta-history book about the real case of a young girl in Aberdeen killed by the mother of her friend and neighbour in the 1930s, mixing history writing and fiction. It’s as much focused on who gets to tell the story as about the how. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it as much as her other books. I would recommend The Rift or The Art of Space Travel to anyone looking to get started with her.
Early Sorrow– Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann’s short story Early Sorrow (1925) gives a fascinating insight into social history in the earlier stages of the German hyperinflation crisis. An eccentric academic family in Munich, who were previously well-to-do, try to host a party for their teenage children on a limited budget. “Even in these times, when something funny happens people still have to laugh”
The croquettes are made of turnips, and the dessert comes from a depressing powder mix. With inflation, the professor’s salary is now an unimaginable million Marks, yet it doesn’t go far. Eggs are six thousand marks each, and the family rush out to different shops to each buy their personal ration of five before the price increases again.
At the party, the Professor looks on in bemusement at the new social mores of the Jazz Age where everyone is on first name terms, bring their own cigarettes and drinks, and none of the ladies faint. The story was also one of Ernest Hemingway’s all-time favourites.
Mario and the Magician– Thomas Mann
Mann’s prescient novella from the 1920s about the rise of Fascism. A German family go on a seaside holiday to Italy, but find Fascism has already had more of an effect on society there than they expected. They get thrown out of their original hotel because a rich lady from Rome complains about their child’s cough. Local children have become intense nationalists, and bully foreign kids. After the family get reported to the police and fined for “public indecency” because their seven year old daughter changed out of her swimming costume on the beach, they decide to go to a magic show to cheer everyone up.
Signore Cipolla (Mr Onion) the magician doesn’t turn out to be at all fun however. There was “not a trace of personal jocularity or clownishness in his pose, manner or behaviour”. He’s a cruel, manipulative fascist, who wields a riding crop on stage, and enjoys humiliating the participants in his shows via hypnotism or firing endless maths questions at them, leaves a cheerful local heckler in physical pain, and constantly lectures the audience about the importance of “the capacity for self-surrender, becoming a tool, the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation” as cover for his own insecurities. His authoritarian spell is only broken when local waiter Mario unexpectedly shoots him.
Future Days– David Stubbs
An extremely thorough, but also extremely entertaining history of Krautrock by a former Melody Maker journalist. I was slightly dreading ploughing through a dry reference behemoth like Reiner Stach’s Kafka biographies, but actually the book is a lot of fun. When I looked Stubbs up I realised he used to write the jokingly bile-laden Mr Agreeable column in the MM, which was similar to Charlie Brooker’s TV Go Home columns, except about music.
In 1979 Stubbs read a glowing recommendation for Faust by a journalist he respected, and sent off for one of their albums, without hearing a minute of their music. It took months to arrive, and sounded nothing like he’d imagined. He loved it anyway. The first time he played It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl his dad rushed upstairs in a panic thinking the boiler was exploding. (Which made me think of the time my boiler made a similar noise and heavy rumble, and I spent a while fiddling with it in confusion, before reading in the newspaper the next day we’d had a very rare earthquake in Reading).
In England we used to have a compulsory class for sixth formers (the final two years of high school) called General Studies, where you learnt about current affairs and practiced presentation skills. David Stubbs brought his new Faust record in for a show and tell session in this class, and played it for his friends. They all hated it. He recounted that as the hour went on there was “a growing anger among some of my friends at what they’d been subjected to, that such music existed and that one of their own kind was listening to it”
It also reminded me of The Rotters Club by Jonathan Coe, a classic coming of age novel (with terrible sequels) set in late seventies Birmingham. Some of the characters form a band, and the first rehearsal starts out as a prog band with a song about Gandalf, and then it somehow morphs into a punk band in the middle, before the band splits up in a huge argument about musical direction.
Neu Klang– Christoph Dallach
An oral history of Krautrock composed entirely of quotes from different musicians and artists involved. Dallach is a music critic for Der Spiegel (The Mirror), the most prominent quality news magazine in Germany, similar in stature to The Atlantic or The New Yorker. This high profile meant that he was able to interview pretty much every key player in depth, along with all sorts of other interesting people such as jazz musicians and visual artists who were also around the same scene.
The Tobacconist– Robert Seethaler
A naive seventeen year old boy from the Salzkammergut moves to Vienna in 1937 to work in a tobacconists’ shop on Währinger Straße. The shop owner is a grumpy eccentric Communist who lost his leg in the First World War, but he turns out to be a kind and interesting boss. Sigmund Freud is one of the regular customers, and Franz and the professor become friends. However the Nazis are coming, and Franz’s new life is about to be blown to smithereens.
The book is also extremely Austrian, with a far more humorous approach than you would find in a book written by a German. Freud thinks about the uncomfortable jaw prothesis he needs to wear after semi-successful cancer surgery “the truth was that none of these eminent doctors were any good. Maybe he should see a carpenter next time. Or go straight to a tombstone carver”. An attitude that life is essentially some sort of cosmic joke, and you should just try to roll with it, that is also found in Czech and Hungarian works.
I realised I had actually walked down the same street the book is set on every day at one point, when I was sent to a nearby school. At the top end on one corner where the tram stop is, there is an old lady clothes shop that seemingly hasn’t changed a single thing since the early eighties. As you walk or get the tram down into town, you pass a huge assortment of shops, along with multiple tobacconists (and a branch of Sonnentor). I did a virtual walkthrough on Google Maps and wrote about the journey in Mitteleuropa.
Momo– Michael Ende
Michael Ende’s other major work, known by everyone in German-speaking countries, but little-known in English. An anti-capitalist fairytale. The sinister Men in Grey turn up as sales reps for the Time Bank, offering customers interest on the time they save by giving up everyday pleasures and focusing only on work and profit, and trying to persuade children to give up on imagination in favour of expensive electronic AI toys. The Men in Grey aren’t time bankers however, they’re time thieves who sustain themselves by smoking dismal-smelling grey cigars made from the withered flowers of the time and happiness they’ve stolen from people.
Surrender to Night– Georg Trakl
Read the poems in English for free here
All roads in my book seemed to lead to the poet Georg Trakl. Like all rockstars, he died in 1914 of a drugs overdose at the age of 27, but has been hugely influential in German literature. The Trakl household was wildly dysfunctional, the kind of Austro-Hungarian family who provided Freud with such fertile material. In the era of over the counter opiates, Georg was a laudanum and cocaine addict by the age of 17, and pursued a career as a pharmacist to gain easy access to drugs.
In 1914 he went to the Eastern Front as a military pharmacist. After the brutal Battle of Grodek in Galicia, Trakl was left alone to treat ninety horrifically injured men stranded in a barn, with almost no supplies. Many of the men begged him to shoot them and put them out of their misery. Trakl had a breakdown and threatened to shoot himself too, and was sent to a military asylum, where he died from a drugs overdose.
Trakl’s poems focus on isolation, decay and the fragility of the human condition, and have a style I can only describe as “T.S. Eliot, but goth”. The two writers have a similar elegiac tone, and sparse, atmospheric style, full of space and silence. Trakl’s poems are full of lines liked “her hair bristling with dung and worms”and “spiders look for my heart”. Silence, shadows, fading autumn afternoons, rotting fruit, death knells and worms. Critic James Wright says “one does not read them so much as explore them”. Unsurprisingly Trakl’s poetry has been an inspiration for black metal bands, and dark ambient acts like Ulver (who themselves started out as a black metal band).
Youth and the State in Hungary: Capitalism, Communism and Class– László Kürti
Do you want a very thorough anthropological investigation of youth culture in an industrial suburb of Budapest in the 80s? This is your text (which can be read for free online here). I imagine it’s of little interest outside that. His commentary on the macho and unreconstructed behaviour of Hungarian men echoes every single complaint I’ve heard about them from Hungarian women even decades later
In 1986 he did a study at the Csepel Művek ironworks on an island on the outskirts of Budapest, a huge industrial and military site that employed most of the local residents (it is now closed), whose whole environs and working culture seemed a relic of the Stalinist era. He increasingly found himself more interested in the young people there and their lives outside work than social structures within the ironworks. A big social factor was kölcsönösség (mutual borrowing), where friends lent each other music, videos and audio equipment. This was able to be a lot more free and open than in Czechoslovakia or Russia at the time due to the much lower likelihood of being arrested, but the same economic factors limiting the ability to buy these things and the increased importance of DIY friendship networks to access new music were still in place.
Hungary under Goulash Communism was a lot laxer in terms of censorship than their Warsaw Pact brethren. Music was classified by the state music industry on the “Three Ts” scale: Tiltott (banned) Tűrt (tolerated) or Támogatott (promoted), continuing the principle that “anyone who is not against us is with us”. Támogatott musicians could get a deal with the state-owned Hungaroton records (officially the only record label in the country). Local Tűrt groups were on their own, but nobody was stopping them releasing their own albums on tape via DIY Samizdat networks, as long as they were careful to not to stray over the line into anything that would banish them into Tiltott status.
Blank tapes were easily available in Hungary, manufactured locally by the Polimer brand, and many people did almost all their listening to music taped off the radio or friend’s albums, as new LPs were expensive and not always easy to get outside Budapest. Another workaround for the Tolerated artists was to arrange appearances in arthouse Hungarian films, which were also similarly laxly monitored. This also provided quality music videos for the bands. Youth clubs were an important part of this infrastructure: they ran interest clubs, provided equipment people could borrow for creative projects and hosted bands and film showings.
I wrote a whole chapter about underground and New Wave music in Hungary in the 80s in Mitteleuropa.
Michael Kohlhaas– Heinrich von Kleist
Kafka was a huge fan of German playwright and novelist Heinrich von Kleist. Kleist was born into a noble Prussian family in 1777, and was a contemporary of Goethe and Schiller. He died at the age of thirty four in 1811 after making a suicide pact with his terminally ill girlfriend Henriette Vogel, who was dying of cancer.
Kleist’s plays were a success, but his most famous book is the novella Michael Kohlhaas from 1810, an epic tale of feudal revenge over a mere seventy pages, based on a real story from the early sixteenth century. It is often considered one of the best short stories ever in German.
Kohlhaas is a horse dealer from Brandenburg who goes to Saxony to sell some horses. A corrupt Saxon nobleman seizes his horses, mistreats them and beats up Kohlhaas’ assistant. Trying the official route of suing the noble goes nowhere because he’s too well connected. Kohlhaas’ beloved wife goes to speak to the nobleman and comes back beaten and fatally injured. After her death he can think of nothing but revenge, and leads an uprising. It’s basically a western set in the era of Martin Luther.
Kleist fits an incredible amount of satisfying story into very little space, and I can’t figure out how he does it. You feel like chapters have gone by, drawing you in to this world and these characters, completely absorbed, yet somehow you’re only ten pages in. You can absolutely see the influence on Kafka with the careful economy of language, and a certain way of describing small physical movements to suggest a larger psychological portrait.
Kleist is little known in the UK however, and I don’t really understand why (much like Georg Trakl). I did a straw poll, and in my social circle only German speakers were familiar with him. One English speaker knew of Kleist from Philip Pullman discussing him as an influence, but that was it. There is a French film adaptation of Michael Kohlhaas from 2013 with Mads Mikkelsen as Michael that won prizes but seemed to sink without a trace in the UK. The French trailer is atmospheric and suspenseful, but the English one has an obnoxious Hollywood voiceover, which doesn’t help matters.
Marble Hall Murders– Anthony Horowitz
After finishing writing the book I desperately needed to read something I wasn’t required to have any opinion or write anything much about, which required little of me. This instalment is much the same as any others in the series- a competent mid brow whodunnit that goes down easily.
The Haunted Wood– Sam Leith
I was going to heartily recommend this history of children’s literature as being a fun read, but the chapter about JK Rowling towards the end left a bad taste in my mouth. The author has that patronising “enlightened centrist” perspective that people who care about injustice or bigotry are silly and making a fuss, and “real” people don’t bother about these things because they’re superiorly above it all. I wondered who the hell this guy was, and looked him up. He’s an ex-Etonian nepotism baby who works at the Spectator.
(Don’t) Call Mum- Matt Wesolowski
A horror novella set on a crappy pacer train to Northumberland. An obnoxious posh Durham student gets on the wrong train and annoys every other passenger with his loud yah mummy this place is full of peasants phone call, before things turn dark. It was a good read, but what I really recommend by the same author is his Six Stories series, which pretends to be transcripts of a true crime podcast focusing on unsolved cases from northern England in the 90s and 2000s, but is actually folk horror.
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