German Gothic?

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German Gothic?

1DieFledermaus
maig 15, 2022, 5:50 am

I have a side project on German Gothic novels/stories and am looking for recommendations. The books that I’ve read and ones on the pile are listed below:

Read -

Faust - Goethe
The Black Spider - Jeremias Gotthelf
The Wandering Jew - Stefan Heym
Tales of Hoffmann - ETA Hoffmann (Penguin version, stories are Mademoiselle de Scudery, The Sandman, The Artushof, Councillor Krespel, The Entail, Doge and Dogaressa, The Mines at Falun, The Choosing of the Bride)
The Marquise of O and Other Stories - Heinrich von Kleist
The Golem - Gustav Meyrink
The Magic Ring - Friedrich Heinrich Karl La Motte-Fouqué
Perfume - Patrick Suskind
“Blonde Eckbert” - Ludwig Tieck
The Maimed - Hermann Ungar

On the pile -

Peter Schlemiel - Adelbert von Chamisso
The Jew’s Beech - Annette von Droste-Hulshoff
Horrid Mysteries - Carl Grosse
The Necromancer - Karl Friedrich Kahlert
The Devil’s Elixirs - Hoffmann
Undine - La Motte-Fouqué
The Ghost Seer - Friedrich Schiller
The Dwarf of Westerbourg - Christian Heinrich Spiess
The Rider on the White Horse - Theodor Storm

The Amber Witch - Wilhelm Meinhold - there’s a free online version

(both "German" and "Gothic" are used loosely--Austrian/Swiss etc. authors and some that might be more Romantic/fantasy/decadent etc.)

I'm mainly looking for 19th c. and earlier works, but any recommendations would be of interest. (I don't consider him Gothic, but Leo Perutz sometimes gets listed in German-language fantastic fiction--I've read most of his novels that have been translated to English)

2housefulofpaper
maig 15, 2022, 4:15 pm

>1 DieFledermaus:

You've gone deeper into this than I have and I don't think I have any specific suggestions.

There's this book, which I own but have yet to read: Tales of the German Imagination. The link should, fingers crosses, take you to an Amazon page with a "look inside" feature.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Imagination-Brothers-Ingeborg-Bachmann-Classics/dp/0141...

It doesn't help that the sort of thing you're looking for tends to be classified as "Romanticism", "Sturm und Drang", "Märchen", in preference to Gothic - that's how it seems to me, at any rate.

3indeedox
maig 15, 2022, 4:51 pm

Maybe also Flagman Thiel by Hauptmann and Woyzeck by Büchner? I found them "schaurig".

4LolaWalser
maig 15, 2022, 8:10 pm

I don't know whether she's available in English, but it should at least be noted that Sophie Tieck (Tieck-Bernhardi), Ludwig's sister, also not only wrote Romantic fantastic tales but has been shown to have provided the plot twist of Der blonde Eckbert.

Wilhelm Hauff and Ludwig Bechstein collected and retold but also wrote original stories, many of which have fantastic and horror elements.

Hanns Heinz Ewers and Alfred Kubin are both about half in the 19th, half in the 20 century. I particularly like Kubin's Die andere Seite (The other side), which might be described as a metaphysical Gothic novel, but not only. Ewers is well known as a decadent horror writer. Alraune is probably his best known work (and has been filmed at least three times in Germany alone).

5LolaWalser
Editat: maig 15, 2022, 8:11 pm

double post

6DieFledermaus
maig 16, 2022, 6:18 am

>2 housefulofpaper: - That one looks interesting--adding to the list. Yeah, it does seem like there isn't too much translated work out there so I had a pretty broad definition for Gothic. Also, all the ones that I've read weren't read specifically for my current project, but I wanted to list any vaguely supernatural German-language works.

>3 indeedox: - Thanks for the recommendations! Hadn't heard of Hauptmann before (even though he won the Nobel Prize) and that one does look interesting. I'd probably want to read Woyzeck just in general because of the opera.

>4 LolaWalser: - Interesting to hear about Sophie Tieck. I did look her up, but the only translated work I could find was in The Queen's Mirror, a collection of fairy tales by German women. (There was a collections of her stories, but they were translated into....Polish.) There's an archive of her work but in the original language

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sophsupp_gallery/65/

Ewers and Kubin would definitely fit my project, and I hadn't heard of Hauff and Bechstein--thanks for the recommendations!

7Yuki-Onna
ag. 23, 2022, 3:34 pm

8defaults
ag. 26, 2022, 5:48 am

Georg Heym might fit here? I was so exhausted by the grimness of his poetry that I've yet to recover for his prose, though.

9housefulofpaper
set. 21, 2022, 7:01 pm

This recent anthology (I can't give a personal view or review - I literally found out about it a couple of minutes ago) may be if interest. Ghosts and Robbers: An Anthology of German Gothic Fiction

https://www.snugglybooks.co.uk/ghosts-and-robbers/