Lutz Seiler

A panoramic and picaresque novel of the first years after the fall of the Berlin Wall is told through the experiences of a young man making his way in a time of constant change. A bestseller in Germany and winner of the prestigous Leipzig Prize. Star 111 (the name of a popular East German transistor radio) begins with the world turned upside down. It is the fall of 1989. The communist government of the GDR is losing its grip on power. Carl Bischoff, a very young man, trained as a bricklayer, now a college student, is abruptly recalled by his parents to the small town in the middle of nowhere where he grew up. His hardworking unprotesting parents inform him, that with the border open, they intend to leave the country and check into a West German refugee camp. Will Carl to look after the house and take in the mail? They promise at some point to be in touch. Deserted by his parents, Carl has no idea what to do. Then he packs the family car and heads to Berlin, where he joins a group of squatters led by a shepherd with a goat. Carl participates in the anarchic life of an anarchist commune, and keeps his distance too. He has all sorts of things to learn about himself and others. He is hungry for sex and love and sometimes simply hungry. He worries about his parents. He wants to be a poet. Star 111 is a story about unforeseen ends and new beginnings, about different kinds of families, biological and improvised, and one innocent young aspiring poet in pursuit of experience at a moment in history when everything is about to change and nobody knows how. A tender, entrancing, and comic tale of youth and adventure, it is a book that looks back on the history of our time to ask the most fundamental of question: what does it mean to lead a good life?

Kogumik sisaldab novelle nuudiskirjanikelt ule kogu maailma ja viib lugeja muuhulgas ühte prantsuse pühapäeva, lopmatusse aega, mis jääb autost väljumise ja koduuksest sisseastumise vahele, hobuse pähe, India tänavatele, maailmaloppu Mikist ootama, surrogaatema igapäeva, kokandustundi ja muidugi reisile inimhinge südamesse. Kokku saavad autori-tolkija paarid Szila'rd Borbe'ly ja Lauri Eesmaa, Manon Uphoff ja Kairi Look, Maksim Ossipov ja Veronika Einberg, Annie Saumont ja Maria Esko, Roman Malonovskoi ja Ilona Martson, Bart Moeyaert ja Kerti Tergem, Kyoko Nakajima ja Alari Allik, Lutz Seiler ja Eve Sooneste, Yiyun Li ja Ann Alari, Menis Kumandareas ja Kaarina Rein, Dalton Trevisan ja Mariliin Vassenin, A. Igoni Barrett ja Heili Sepp, Alvydas Slepikas ja Tiina Kattel, Jan Balaba'n ja Küllike Tohver, Lana Bastasic' ja Madis Vainomaa, Kunwar Narain ja Mathura, Edina Szvoren ja Lauri Eesmaa. NB! Veebipoest tellides disaini valida ei saa.

In Case of Loss gathers the best of Lutz Seiler's non-fiction from last twenty-five years, revealing his essays to be different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry. Seiler's beautifully anecdotal and associative pieces throw fascinating light on literature and his background, not least the environmental and human catastrophe of the Soviet-era mining in the community he grew up in, ‘the tired villages . . . beneath which lay the ore, uranium.’ Other essays focus on poetry, including his discovery of poetry during his military service and pieces on German poets, including Ernst Meister, Jürgen Becker and Peter Huchel, whose former house, outside Berlin, is now home to Lutz Seiler, after he broke and entered it with Huchel's widow's blessing. Meanwhile, the title essay – a fascinating insight into creative process – describes Huchel's notebook, a kind of dictionary of poetic images organised by mood and location. Providing a perfect welcome in to his work as a whole, In Case of Loss sees one of Europe's most original writers speak with openness and clarity in essays full of insight, humanity and a poet's attention to the importance of often overlooked objects and lives.

On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents' suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, 'You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.'

Winner of the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger Shortlisted for the 2022 Prix Femina etranger #1 on the Spiegel Bestseller List November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter, following a secret dream they've harboured all their lives, set out for life in the West. Carl, their son, refuses to keep watch over the family home and instead heads to Berlin, where he lives in his father's car until he is taken in by a group of squatters. Led by a shepherd and his goat, the pack of squatters sets up the first alternative bar in East Berlin and are involved in guerrilla occupations. And it's with them that Carl, trained as a bricklayer, finds himself an initiate of anarchy, of love, and above all of poetry. Winner of the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize and a bestseller in German already with 150,000 copies sold, Star 111, musical and incantatory, tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family exploded by political change which must find its way back together.

du ser hur tallarna mot himlen får tunnare & tunnare hud & flagnar i topparna, är råa, ömma i själva verket orörbara, du

“Mesterligt." – Jyllands-Posten ????????????“Veloplagt." – Kristeligt Dagblad ??????????" En smuk roman." – Weekendavisen"Lutz Seiler har skrevet en blændende roman om små skæbner i midten af verdenshistorien." – Information To dage efter murens fald forlader Inge og Walter Bischoff deres tidligere liv, nærmest over hals og hoved og overlader deres lejlighed til sønnen Carl. Men Carl nægter at overtage barndomshjemmet og flygter til Berlin. Her bliver han optaget i en gruppe af unge kvinder og mænd som fører en guerillakamp for at indtage tomme huse, og samtidig driver et kælderværts­hus kaldet Assel, Bænkebideren. I Assel klarer Carl sig gennem kaosset efter murens fald, hele tiden med håbet om at finde sammen med Effi, “den eneste kvinde han nogensinde har været forelsket i”. Efter murens fald opstår der et tomrum hvor et broget univers af farverige eksistenser, lyk­keriddere, hippier og kunstnere besætter tomme huse og danner kreative og autonome ­fællesskaber. Carl er egentlig uddannet murer, noget som han har stor glæde af når Assel skal restaureres. Men egent­lig vil han gerne skrive og drømmer om at få ud­givet en digtsamling. Og en dag møder han helt tilfældigt Effi, som han altid har været betaget af, og de to ind­leder et kærlighedsforhold.

Lutz Seiler grew up in the former East Germany and has lived most of his life outside Berlin. His poems, not surprisingly, are works of the border, the in-between, and the provincial, marked by whispers, weather, time’s relentless passing, the dead and their ghosts. It is a contemporary poetry of landscape, fully aware of its literary and non-literary forebears, a walker’s view of the place Seiler lives, anchored by close, unhurried attention to particulars. With his precise, memorable language—rendered here in compelling English—Seiler has pulled off a difficult feat: recontextualizing and radically personalizing the long tradition of German nature writing for the twenty-first century.

In seinen Heidelberger Poetikvorlesungen schildert Lutz Seiler, wie die Landschaften Ostthuringens und Brandenburgs und die Zeitgeschichte der im Schatten des Uranbergbaus verlebten Kindheit und der Berliner Nachwendezeit in seinem Werk miteinander verbunden sind. Das Bedrangende, Dunkle der DDR-Geschichte, sei es die radioaktive Verseuchung und Zerstorung der Kindheitsdorfer, sei es der Zwang zum Kollektiv in einer autoritaren Gesellschaft - Seiler zeigt, wie die Erlebniswelt DDR in seinen Texten ebenso lebendig wird wie das Aufgehen der Lebensentwurfe in der westlichen Konsum-Ordnung. In den nun erscheinenden drei Vorlesungen "Mude Dorfer. Eine Herkunftsgeschichte", "Die jungen Jahre. Fontane, Huchel und Pink Floyd" und "Potsdamer Platz. Ein Blick durch die Maske" kann man erfahren, was Seiler darunter versteht, dass Poesie "Widerstand" ist (Kruso, 2015), und inwiefern diese ihm einen geschutzten asthetischen Raum fur eigene Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen bietet.

Och inte såg jag i cederträden kattens halvdager, fågelns uppflog, vattnets härlighet som rann över mina armar när jag slammade leran i karet. Dödens lukt gjorde mig blind.

Winner of the German Book Prize, from the winner of the 2023 Georg Büchner Prize. It is 1989, and a young literature student named Ed travels to the Baltic island of Hiddensee, a notorious destination for hippies, idealists, and those at odds with the East German state. On Hiddensee, Ed joins the community of seasonal workers, led by the charismatic, enigmatic Kruso. At night, they secretly help the refugees who have come to the island seeking passage to the West. But Kruso is preoccupied by another kind of freedom — freedom of the mind. As the wave of history washes over the German Democratic Republic, the friends’ grip on reality loosens and life on the island will never be the same.

"Tjugo år senare är Tyskland inte längre en delad nation, allt är fortfarande samma men ändå nytt. Och författarna rör sig kritiskt och nostalgiskt över alla slags gränser: nationella och internationella, historiska och politiska. Det finns inte längre några vattentäta skott mellan form och innehåll där den så kallade engagerade litteraturen lyfts fram på bekostnad av den formmässigt inriktade litteraturen. Skillnaden mellan liv och text suddas ut. Livet sker i texten. Litteraturen ger livet liv." - Ur Lotta Lundbergs förord

Lutz Seiler fo?ddes 1963 i Gera, Tyskland. Efter att fo?rst ha arbetat som murare och sedan studerat germanistik i slutet av 80-talet va?nde han sig slutligen till litteraturen fo?r gott. Som en av de viktigaste fo?retra?darna fo?r den nya tyska litteraturen efter murens fall har han sedan 90-talet givit ut flera diktsamlingar, noveller, essa?er och en roman. Han tillho?r idag Tysklands fra?msta p

Lutz Seiler grew up in the former East Germany and has lived most of his life outside Berlin. His poems, not surprisingly, are works of the border, the in-between, and the provincial, marked by whispers, weather, time’s relentless passing, the dead and their ghosts. It is a contemporary poetry of landscape, fully aware of its literary and non-literary forebears, a walker’s view of the place Seiler lives, anchored by close, unhurried attention to particulars. With his precise, memorable language—rendered here in compelling English—Seiler has pulled off a difficult feat: recontextualizing and radically personalizing the long tradition of German nature writing for the twenty-first century.