Main entry:

Schürmann, Reiner. aut

Title & Author:

Origins Reiner Schürmann.

Publication:

[S.l.]: Diaphanes, 2016.

Description:

1 online resource (272 p.)

Notes:
Electronic book.
Foreword to the English Edition -- How I Learned to Clench My Fists -- How I Am Thrown Out the Window While Everyone Else in the Kibbutz Takes a Siesta -- How I Take a Midnight Bath in Jaffa -- Why a Jew Swallows Aspirin in the Black Forest -- Why War Surplus Makes a Quebecker Yawn -- How a Polish Woman Takes Me Apart and Puts Me Back Together to Forget the War -- How I Try to Sell Myself to the Americans -- How with My Whole Body I Smash the Past.

Summary:

"Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it." So writes Reiner Schürmann in Origins, a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schürmann's semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of escaping a past he never consciously experienced. All around him are barely concealed reminders of Nazi-inflicted death and destruction. His own experiences of displacement and rootlessness, too, are the burden of a cruel collective past. His story presents itself as a continuous quest for--and struggle to free himself from--his origins. The hero is haunted relentlessly by his fractured identity--in his childhood at his father's factory, where he learns of the Nazi past through a horrible discovery; in an Israeli kibbutz, where, after a few months of happiness, he is thrown out for being a German; in postwar Freiburg, where he reencounters a friend who escaped the Nazi concentration camps; and finally, in the United States, where his attempts at a fresh start almost fail to exorcise the ghosts of the past. Originally published in French in 1976, Origins was the winner of the coveted Prix Broquette-Gonin of the Académie Francaise. In close collaboration with the author, this meticulously crafted translation was created in the early 1990s, but Schürmann's premature death in 1993 prevented its publication process and, as a result, one of the most important literary accounts of the conflicted process of coming to terms with the Holocaust and Germany's Nazi past has been unavailable to English readers until now. Candid and frank, filled with fury and caustic sarcasm, Origins offers insight into a generation caught between disappointment and rage, alignment and rebellion, guilt and obsession with the past.

Resources:
cloudLibrary
Front cover
Front cover, high quality
Front cover thumbnail
Ebook Library
ProQuest Ebook Central

ISBN:

9783037346099
3037346094
9783037345979
3037345977

Subject:

French literature 20th century.
Littérature française 20e siècle.
French literature

Form/genre:

Electronic books.
Biographies
Fiction

Added entries:

Preston, Elizabeth.