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The Week in Germany: Culture January 11, 2008 TWIG Turntable – Weekly German Culture Tips
From music downloads to streaming radio to online booksellers and DVD rental by mail, it has never been easier to take in German culture from abroad than it is today. Starting this week, TWIG will provide a jumping off point for voyages of cultural discovery in the weekly “Turntable” column. Each week, we will let you know what is on our turntable, metaphorically speaking – something worth listening too, reading, or watching from the land of ideas that is also available right here in the USA. Bernhard Schlink’s Homecoming: an Intellectual Odyssey now in English
One summer, while visiting his grandparents in Switzerland, Peter Debauer finds discarded printing proofs from “Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment”, a series of penny novels published by his grandparents. The youngster is gripped by the story about a soldier named Karl who returns from a Russian POW camp to find his wife married to another man, but the last chapters have been torn away, leaving the conclusion a mystery. Peter’s hunt for the rest of the story lasts years, yielding only partial success when he uncovers another section of the book after his grandparents’ deaths. Like many tales of homecoming, the story parallels Homer’s Odyssey. More compellingly, Peter thinks the story also parallels the biography of his own father, who disappeared in the war. His search for answers leads him, among other places, to America, where he links the story to a noted scholar and purported concentration camp survivor who hides a dark past as a Nazi propagandist. The expert in “deconstructionist legal theory” teaches his students that, just as readers are responsible for the meaning contained in texts, the accusers, and not the perpetrators, carry the responsibility for crimes. Like his international bestseller, The Reader, Homecoming is an intellectual thriller that unites the law-professor cum author Schlink’s interest in theories of justice, the relationship between literature and truth and the struggle of Germans born after World War II to come to grips with the crimes of their parents generations. The Reader was included in Oprah Winfrey’s book club and became the first book by a German author to reach number one on the New York Times’ bestseller list. Homecoming is out now in English on the Random House’s Pantheon imprint. |
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