Further Details

Title: War Diary
Condition: New
EAN: 9780857425324
ISBN: 9780857425324
Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
Format: Paperback
Release Date: 29/03/2018
Item Height: 178mm
Item Length: 114mm
Item Width: 13mm
Author: Ingeborg Bachmann
Translator: Mike Mitchell
Contributor: Hans Holler (Edited by), Hans Holler (Afterword by), Jack Hamesh (Contributions by), Mike Mitchell (Translated by)
Language: English
Description: Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights of postwar German literature. As befitting such a versatile writer, her War Diary is not a day-by-day journal but a series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria. These articulate and powerful entries--ll the more remarkable taking into account Bachmann's young age at the time--reveal the eighteen-year-old's hatred of both war and Nazism as she avoids the fanatics' determination to "defend Klagenfurt to the last man and the last woman." The British occupation leads to her incredible meeting with a British officer, Jack Hamesh, a Jew who had originally fled Vienna for England in 1938. He is astonished to find in Austria a young girl who has read banned authors such as Mann, Schnitzler, and Hofmannsthal. Their relationship is captured here in the emotional and moving letters Hamesh writes to Bachmann when he travels to Israel in 1946. In his correspondence, he describes how in his new home of Israel, he still suffers from the rootlessness affecting so many of those who lost parents, family, friends, and homes in the war. War Diary provides unusual insight into the formation of Bachmann as a writer and will be cherished by the many fans of her work. But it is also a poignant glimpse into life in Austria in the immediate aftermath of the war, and the reflections of both Bachmann and Hamesh speak to a significant and larger story beyond their personal experiences.
Country/Region of Manufacture: GB
Book Series: German List
Genre: Biography
Topic: Literary Criticism
Release Year: 2018

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