A Very German Christmas

A Very German Christmas

by Heinrich HeineHermann Hesse Erich Kästner and others
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 19/08/2021

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This collection of new and classic Christmas literature includes stories by Herman Hesse, Joseph Roth, The Brothers Grimm, and many others.


This collection brings together traditional and contemporary holiday stories from Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. You'll find classic works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler, as well as more recent tales by writers like Heinrich Böll, Peter Stamm and Martin Suter. It also includes the first published English translation of Joseph Roth’s story “Christmas in Cochinchina.”


Enjoy Eine fröhliche Weihnachten―A Merry Christmas―made all the more festive with these literary treats redolent of candle-lit trees, St. Nikolaus, gingerbread, Gugelhopf and stollen cakes, all accompanied by plenty of schnapps.

ISBN:
9781939931894
9781939931894
Category:
Short stories
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
19-08-2021
Language:
English
Publisher:
New Vessel Press
Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was born in Calw in 1877, a town in the north of the Black Forest. As a child he was constantly at odds with his religious upbringing and education.

His experiences of childhood, adolescence and the desire to break into the world as an artist would form the matter of his first three novels, Peter Camenzind, The Prodigy and Gertrude. Following an ever-present spiritual thirst, Hesse read widely on theosophy, Buddhism and the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis, even becoming a patient of Carl Jung.

This seeking is evident in some of his greatest novels, such as Demian, Steppenwolf, and Siddhartha. Little known outside of Germany at the time of his death in 1962 the arrival of the first English translation of Siddhartha in 1954 struck a chord with the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Soon after, Hesse became one of the most widely read and translated European authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

The Brothers Grimm

When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm set out to collect stories in the early 1800s, their goal was not to entertain children but to preserve Germanic folklore and the hard life of European peasants was reflected in the tales they discovered.

However, once the brothers saw how the stories entranced young readers, they began softening some of the harsher aspects to make them more suitable for children.

Peter Stamm

Peter Stamm was born in Switzerland. He is the author of the novels Agnes, On A Day Like This, Unformed Landscape, Seven Years and All Days are Night and the collection We're Flying, as well as numerous short stories and radio plays. In 2013, he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize and shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He lives in Winterthur.

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing.

He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933.

In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. IN 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany for Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States, where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the US was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress.

He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822) replaced his third name, Wilhelm, with Amadeus in homage to Mozart. A towering figure of German Romanticism, Hoffmann was a composer, music critic, theater director, draftsman, and caricaturist as well as a writer. Although his stories challenged readers to free their minds from the conventions of reality, Hoffmann accepted the practical constraints of everyday life, training as a lawyer and serving as a judge.

Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist.

On Hitler's assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany for Paris, where he died in poverty a few years later. His books include What I Saw, Job, The White Cities, The String of Pearls and The Radetzky March, all published by Granta Books.

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