Oct 05 2025
Where Miklos Banffy spends nearly 1500 pages of his Transylvanian Trilogy chronicling the life of Hungarian nobility across their half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, in The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil compresses much of the experience of the Austrian half into less than a tenth of that in a tale of life in a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/05/die-verwirrungen-des-zoglings-torless-by-robert-musil/
Oct 12 2024
Dr Miss Mathilde von Zahnd runs one of the most renowned, and one of the most expensive, private psychiatric clinics in all of Switzerland. The enormous fees paid by the rich clientele — in the stage notes before the play proper, Dürrenmatt speaks of moronic millionaires, schizophrenic authors, arteriosclerotic politicians — have enabled most of the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/12/die-physiker-by-friedrich-durrenmatt/
Aug 25 2023
Thirty years ago this spring I read half of Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) during travels in southern Europe and stopped when I was no longer spending long stretches of time on busses or ferries, waiting for same, or otherwise doing the things that young people do when they have plenty of time and little …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/08/25/der-zauberberg-by-thomas-mann/
May 15 2022
Finally reading The Sorrows of Young Werther closes a gap in my education as a German major, a mere thirty years or so after I earned my degree. Because my institution only had two professors of German, an upper-level course in Goethe was only offered periodically. And the one time it was offered when I …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/15/die-leiden-des-jungen-werthers-by-johann-wolfgang-von-goethe/
May 07 2022
I came to Heisser Sommer prepared not to like it. A book by a male author in his forties, looking back on his glorious youth twenty years previous. That Timm chose not to use quotation marks for characters’ speech added to my annoyance. Worse, it’s set in the overexposed late 1960s, featuring a male protagonist …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/07/heisser-sommer-by-uwe-timm/
Apr 02 2022
The first great virtue of the 20-volume “München erlesen” (Selected Munich, with a bit of a pun on the German word for reading) series is the simple fact of its existence. There are not many provincial capitals that could support a literary series that runs to 20 books, let alone one with the quality of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/04/02/reading-munich-munchen-erlesen/
Mar 18 2022
For about the first eighty percent of Wir sind Gefangene (We Are Prisoners), my assessment of the book was that I could see why it was a sensation in the 1920s but couldn’t see much to recommend it for readers of the 2020s. It begins with Graf is at school in the small Bavarian town …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/18/wir-sind-gefangene-by-oskar-maria-graf/
Oct 17 2021
I admired the conception of Das Erwachen (The Awakening) more than I enjoyed its execution. As Josef Ruederer’s widow Elisabeth wrote in an brief introductory note, “[He] wanted to portray life — history and people — in his home city through the nineteenth century up to the present [1916] in a four-volume novel.” Unfortunately, he …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/17/das-erwachen-by-josef-ruederer/
May 29 2021
The editors of the Süddeutsche Zeitung began their series of 20 books in or involving Munich with a local icon, Siegfried Sommer. They finished the set with Karl Valentin, who was born in Munich and grew up in the city but went on to become a national icon as a comedic star on stage, in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/05/29/die-jugendstreiche-des-knaben-karl-by-karl-valentin/
Apr 28 2021
It will not surprise a contemporary reader that a young housewife, neglected by her husband, will find affection elsewhere. Nor did it likely surprise Ludwig Thoma’s audience in 1919 when Münchnerinnen (Munich Ladies) was published. The book is set in the late 1800s, when people would have felt it necessary to affect surprise, though given …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/04/28/munchnerinnen-by-ludwig-thoma/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire