The Karnau Tapes

Literature & Fiction

Beyer, Marcel

Genre Fiction

Minerva

A powerful and disturbing novel of the Nazi era and its legacy by the winner of Germany’s Ernst Willner Prize. During the final days of the Reich, sound engineer Herman Karnau is brought to Hitler’s bunker to record the Fuhrer’s last utterances. There he finds young Helga Goebbels and her siblings, children of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, awaiting a terrible fate. Translated by John Brownjohn.

Harcourt

The young cousins at the center of this gripping novel know they are different from their playmates. Their dark eyes alone set them apart. And as they look at family photo-graphs, the blank spaces between the pictures lead them to wonder about their mysterious past. Who is the beautiful opera singer, the woman with "Italian eyes"? What happened to their grandfather, a pilot with a secret Luftwaffe unit in the Spanish Civil War? Could he still be alive? And why does his second wife forbid the children to speak of the family's history? Questions become suspicions, secrets and rumors become wild insinuations. Combining clues from their own lives with traces of their family's past, the young detectives move from generation to generation. As fact and fiction merge into one, it slowly becomes clear that the truth is maddeningly elusive in this evocative, lyrical, and engrossing tale.

Spies

United States

Mariner Books

"Challenging, beautifully written "--Library JournalHailed by The New Yorker as one of the best young novelists and recipient of Germany’s most prestigious literary awards, Marcel Beyer returns with a brilliantly wrought novel that brings to life both an individual and a whole world: the zoologist Ludwig Kaltenburg, loosely based on Nobel Prize–winner Konrad Lorenz, and his institute for research into animal behavior. Hermann Funk first meets Kaltenburg when still a child in Posen in the 1930s. Hermann’s father, a botanist, and Kaltenburg are close friends, but a rift occurs. In 1945, fleeing the war, the Funks perish in the Dresden bombing, and Hermann finds his way to Kaltenburg’s newly established institute. He becomes Kaltenburg’s protégé, embracing the Institute’s unconventional methods. Yet parts of Kaltenburg’s past life remain unclear. Was he a member of the Nazi Party? Does he believe his discoveries about aggression in animals also apply to humans? Why has he erased the years in Posen from his official biography? Through layers of memory and experience Hermann struggles to reconcile affection and doubt, to make sense of his childhood, even as he meets a woman with family secrets of her own.

Kaltenburg

Literary

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

A powerful and disturbing novel of the Nazi era and its legacy by the winner of Germany’s Ernst Willner Prize. During the final days of the Reich, sound engineer Herman Karnau is brought to Hitler’s bunker to record the Fuhrer’s last utterances. There he finds young Helga Goebbels and her siblings, children of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, awaiting a terrible fate. Translated by John Brownjohn.

KARNAU S

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Flughunde (German Edition)

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Suhrkamp Verlag

Flughunde: Roman (German Edition)

Suhrkamp

Suhrkamp Verlag AG

Seit dem Erscheinen seines ebenso brillanten wie erschütternden Romans »Flughunde« im Jahr 1995 gilt Marcel Beyer als »einer der besten jungen Romanciers der Gegenwart« (The New Yorker). »Flughunde«, mittlerweile in 14 Sprachen übersetzt, erzählt vom Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs aus der Perspektive eines fanatischen Akustikers im Dienste der Nazis und aus der Sicht einer der Töchter Goebbels’, erzählt von der Instrumentalisierung der Sprache durch die Propaganda und von Experimenten mit menschlichen Stimmen. Ulli Lust, eine der bedeutendsten deutschsprachigen Comic-Künstler und erst kürzlich mit dem Comic-Oscar, dem Prix Révélation, ausgezeichnet, legt hier Marcel Beyers verstörendes Meisterwerk als Graphic Novel vor.

Flughunde: Graphic Novel

Lust, Ulli

Spione.

Fischer (Tb.), Frankfurt

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