The Impossible Exile

2014-05-06 Biography & Autobiography

Author : George Prochnik
Release : 2014-05-06
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 133/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Impossible Exile by : George Prochnik

Download or read book The Impossible Exile written by George Prochnik. This book was released on 2014-05-06. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original study of exile, told through the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. Zweig was also an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. Yet after Hitler’s rise to power, this celebrated writer who had dedicated so much energy to promoting international humanism plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile—from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petrópolis—where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself. The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig’s extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, with great acumen, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era—the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.

Stranger in a Strange Land

2017-03-21 Biography & Autobiography

Author : George Prochnik
Release : 2017-03-21
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 776/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Stranger in a Strange Land by : George Prochnik

Download or read book Stranger in a Strange Land written by George Prochnik. This book was released on 2017-03-21. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking his lead from his subject, Gershom Scholem—the 20th century thinker who cracked open Jewish theology and history with a radical reading of Kabbalah—Prochnik combines biography and memoir to counter our contemporary political crisis with an original and urgent reimagining of the future of Israel. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Prochnik revisits the life and work of Gershom Scholem, whose once prominent reputation, as a Freud-like interpreter of the inner world of the Cosmos, has been in eclipse in the United States. He vividly conjures Scholem’s upbringing in Berlin, and compellingly brings to life Scholem’s transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, the critic and philosopher. In doing so, he reveals how Scholem’s frustration with the bourgeois ideology of Germany during the First World War led him to discover Judaism, Kabbalah, and finally Zionism, as potent counter-forces to Europe’s suicidal nationalism. Prochnik’s own years in the Holy Land in the 1990s brings him to question the stereotypical intellectual and theological constructs of Jerusalem, and to rediscover the city as a physical place, rife with the unruliness and fecundity of nature. Prochnik ultimately suggests that a new form of ecological pluralism must now inherit the historically energizing role once played by Kabbalah and Zionism in Jewish thought.

Three Lives

2011-11-29 Biography & Autobiography

Author : Oliver Matuschek
Release : 2011-11-29
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 951/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Three Lives by : Oliver Matuschek

Download or read book Three Lives written by Oliver Matuschek. This book was released on 2011-11-29. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a great wealth of newly available sources, this definitive biography recounts the eventful life of a great writer spoilt by success—a life lived in the shadow of two world wars, and which ended tragically in a suicide pact. Matuschek examines three major phases in the life of the world-famous Austrian author—his years of apprenticeship, his years of success as a professional working writer in Salzburg, and finally his years of exile in Britain, the USA and Brazil. Including the sort of personal detail conspicuously absent from Zweig's memoir, and incorporating newly discovered documents, Matuschek's biography offers us a privileged view into the private world of the master of psychological insight.

Heinrich Heine

2020-11-24 Biography & Autobiography

Author : George Prochnik
Release : 2020-11-24
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 624/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Heinrich Heine by : George Prochnik

Download or read book Heinrich Heine written by George Prochnik. This book was released on 2020-11-24. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thematically rich, provocative, and lyrical study of one of Germany’s most important, world-famous, and imaginative writers Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was a virtuoso German poet, satirist, and visionary humanist whose dynamic life story and strikingly original writing are ripe for rediscovery. In this vividly imagined exploration of Heine’s life and work, George Prochnik contextualizes Heine’s biography within the different revolutionary political, literary, and philosophical movements of his age. He also explores the insights Heine offers contemporary readers into issues of social justice, exile, and the role of art in nurturing a more equitable society. Heine wrote that in his youth he resembled “a large newspaper of which the upper half contained the present, each day with its news and debates, while in the lower half, in a succession of dreams, the poetic past was recorded fantastically like a series of feuilletons.” This book explores the many dualities of Heine’s nature, bringing to life a fully dimensional character while also casting into sharp relief the reasons his writing and personal story matter urgently today.

Ostend

2016-01-26 Biography & Autobiography

Author : Volker Weidermann
Release : 2016-01-26
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 273/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Ostend by : Volker Weidermann

Download or read book Ostend written by Volker Weidermann. This book was released on 2016-01-26. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s the summer of 1936, and the writer Stefan Zweig is in crisis. His German publisher no longer wants him, his marriage is collapsing, and his house in Austria—searched by the police two years earlier—no longer feels like home. He’s been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town that is a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with fellow writer and semi-estranged close friend Joseph Roth, who is himself about to fall in love. For a moment, they create a fragile haven. But as Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn. In Ostend, Volker Weidermann lyrically recounts “the summer before the dark,” when a coterie of artists, intellectuals, drunks, revolutionaries, and madmen found themselves in limbo while Europe teetered on the edge of fascism and total war. Ostend is the true story of two of the twentieth century’s great writers, written with a novelist’s eye for pacing, chronology, and language—a dazzling work of historical nonfiction. (Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway)

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The Impossible Exile

Stranger in a Strange Land

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