Franz Fühmann's magnum opus.
At the Burning Abyss is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter
with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of
two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of
poetry.
Picking up where his last book, The Jew Car, left off, Fühmann probes
his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions--Nazism, then
socialism--and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic
verses. He confronts Trakl's "unlivable life," as his poetry transcends
the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful,
necessary understanding of "the whole human being: in victories and
triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in
splendor and in ordure."
In 1982, the German edition of At the Burning Abyss won the West
German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its "courage to resist
inhumanity." At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost
none of its urgency.