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2 books match the query 'Fühmann, Franz'
The Beloved of the Dawn
Franz Fühmann
Seagull Books, 2022
Four classical Greek myths retold with unexpected twists by an East German dissident.
Franz Fühmann’s subversive retellings of four Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In them, Fühmann plumbs the ancient tales’ depths and makes them his own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power. In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while “Hera and Zeus” probes the divine couple’s tumultuous relationship and its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war. Fühmann’s unflinching account of Marsyas’ flaying by Apollo has been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fühmann’s shimmering prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee’s exquisite collages.
Franz Fühmann’s subversive retellings of four Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In them, Fühmann plumbs the ancient tales’ depths and makes them his own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power. In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while “Hera and Zeus” probes the divine couple’s tumultuous relationship and its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war. Fühmann’s unflinching account of Marsyas’ flaying by Apollo has been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fühmann’s shimmering prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee’s exquisite collages.
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What Kind of Island in What Kind of Sea?
Franz Fühmann
Lever Press, 2021
The dignity of cognitively disabled people and the ethics of representing their lives are at the heart of an extraordinary yet little-known book first published in the former German Democratic Republic. Was für eine Insel in was für einem Meer, or What Kind of Island in What Kind of Sea (Rostock, Hinstorff, 1986) depicts residents of a church-run institution for people with cognitive disabilities in astonishing black-and-white photographs by Dietmar Riemann and in a probing, poignant essay by esteemed German writer Franz Fühmann. This important text, which moved from a medical model to a historical and cultural view of disability as an aspect of human identity and experience, is translated into English for the first time by Elizabeth Hamilton and includes reflections on the book and its impact. As fuller, global histories of disability are now being written, What Kind of Island in What Kind of Sea opens an essential window onto a formerly shuttered world, demonstrating the power of the arts to hone our capacity to perceive and appreciate human difference.
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