The first comprehensive study in English of Schmidt's famous and
controversial novel.
Arno Schmidt (1914-1979) is considered one of the most daring and
influential writers of postwar Germany; the Germanist Jeremy Adler has
called him a "giant of postwar German literature." Schmidt was awarded
the Fontane Prize in 1964 and the Goethe Prize in 1973, and his early
fiction has been translated into English to high critical acclaim, but
he is not a well-known figure in the English-speaking world, where his
complex work remains at the margins of critical inquiry. Volker
Langbehn's book introduces Schmidt to the English-speaking audience,
with primary emphasis on his most famous novel, Zettel's Traum. One
reviewer called the book an "elephantine monster" because of its
unconventional size (folio format), length (1334 pages and over 10
million characters), and unique presentation of text in the form of
notes, typewritten pages, parallel columns, and collages. The novel
narrates the life of themain characters, Daniel Pagenstecher, Paul
Jacobi and his wife Wilma, and their teenage daughter Franziska. In
discussing the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, the four engage in the
problems connected with a translation of Poe.Langbehn's study
investigates how literary language can mediate or account for the world
of experiences and for concepts. Schmidt's use of unconventional
presentation formats challenges us to analyze how we think about reading
and writing literary texts. Instead of viewing such texts as a
representation of reality, Schmidt's novel destabilizes this
unquestioned mode of representation, posing a radical challenge to what
contemporary literary criticism defines as literature. No comprehensive
study of Zettel's Traum exists in English.
Volker Langbehn is professor of German at San Francisco State
University.
