Biographie solidement documentée qui, en plus de bien situer cet étrange écrivain dans le contexte culturel de son époque, rétablit la vérité sur une foule de clichés et de légendes qui ont fleuri, tant autour de son oeuvre audacieuse qu'à propos de sa personnalité longtemps tributaire de témoignages biaisés. Récit maîtrisé, passionnant et révélateur.
In Life in Dark Ages Ernst Pawel tells the intriguing story of his first 30 years.At the time of the writing, Pawel was dying of lung cancer. He faced his illness with the same mix of candor, humor and anger as he faced fleeing the Nazis from Berlin to Belgrade, where he, a boy of 14, and his Jewish family were tolerated, but hardly welcome. He became part of the Yugoslav underground movement and eventually emigrated to America, where he joined the Army to fight the fascist plague. Disarming and on target, Pawel tells his story curmudgeonly, yet behind his wide open critical eye we come to recognize a deeply humane man whose intelligence was keen, whose love passionate, and whose integrity inspiring.
Portraying a poet at the height of his creativity, a biography of Heinrich Heine, a popular German poet of the 1800s who revolutionized the language, shares the work of his last eight years when he was confined to his bed with a mysterious ailment.
To look at the modern world is, to some extent, to look at it through Franz Kafka's eyes. For the writers and readers who have followed him, Kafka is the preeminent writer and consciousness of the twentieth century. In The Nightmare of Reason, Ernst Pawel has captured what is essential in Kafka and has described, evenly and dispassionately, the interplay of work and life. Kafka is a modern myth. Not only his work, but the distortions in previous biographies—particularly the first, written by Kafka's great friend Max Brod—make this so. Pawel's achievement is to place Kafka in his time and to portray a man whose life was far more moving than the myths that have arisen around it. The Nightmare of Reason, as well as chronicling the life of the writer, is also a brilliant evocation of a milieu. The Prague of affluent Germanized Jewry, the intellectual ferment of Central Europe before the First World War, and brilliant, doomed Austria-Hungary itself and its collapse are woven into Pawel's account. The Nightmare of Reason is informed by psychological insights but does not depend on them. Indeed, Pawel is concerned to present not the Kafka of legend—that helpless, neurasthenic clerk—but rather a man who moved about in the world, who was a most reluctant but surprisingly effective business executive, and who was in some ways as typical of his age and class as, in others, he transcended them. Pawel has taken nothing at face value, and his readings of such problematic issues as Kafka's Judaism, his relations with his parents, the stormy engagement to Felice Bauer, and his affair with Milena Jesenká are immensely revealing and persuasive.
Pawel, Ernst: Der Dichter stirbt, Heinrich Heines letzte Jahre in Paris, Aus dem Englischen von Regina Schmidt.Ott, DEA, Berlin, Berlin 1997, 240 S., OPbd. m. OU., gut erhalten