#berthold auerbach

#and 19th c biographical novels that depict historical figures in hilarious and disturbing ways

and wondered if you had any recommendations?

(It's not quite a biographical novel ,but you might like *Charles Auchester* by Elizabeth Sara Sheppard, who is Felix Mendelssohn idfic with the serial numbers filed off: see my review at https://landofnowhere.dreamwidth.org/99862.html.)

Thanks for the recommendation, Farouche! Your review has me excited to read Charles Auchester over the summer, and I'll try my hand at a few recommendations of my own.

I'll admit upfront that I've mostly read novels of this kind in German, and am not aware of translations for most of them right now. The novel I have the most experience with is Berthold Auerbach's Poet and Merchant: a Portrait of Life in the Time of Moses Mendelssohn, which is available in German here and English here. It takes as its subject the obscure and unhappy life of the poet Ephraim Moses Kuh, who after a difficult childhood receives the opportunity to travel to Berlin in the mid-18th century. This framework is mostly an excuse for Auerbach to include his favorite historical figures—Moses Mendelssohn, of course, but Lessing and Gleim show up in the army, and in Mendelssohn's living-room we get to meet Salomon Maimon, Aaron Gumperz and Johann Caspar Lavater. A.L. Karsch even shows up at a wedding, I think!

While the scenes of luminary debate are delightful, the overall arc of the story deals with heavy themes: What's the use of a poetic vocation? More broadly, what is fulfillment? How do you live as a person and citizen of a country that considers you neither? Unlike in Auchester (as far as I can tell; I'm only a few pages in), antisemitism features heavily in the story, both in scenes of individual violence and as a pall hanging over the characters trying to conduct their lives within inhuman limits. Auerbach's clearly turning to the 18th century with a 19th-century lens, in the hope that Mendelssohn's project can provide an answer to contemporary problems, so while his "portrait" is clearly made with love, it's not necessarily accurate. On the other hand, the novel develops certain interpersonal dynamics excellently; the unfolding understanding between Kuh and his uncle Veitel is one, and the enthusiastic, very R/romantic admiration between Kuh's sister Violet and Lessing is another.

I'm also reading Lessing: Roman by Hermann Klencke. As far as I know, it's only ever been published in German. It appears he's written a whole series of biographical novels of 18th-century German writers. My mutual @estomia has read his Gleim novel, but I haven't (yet).

Going a little out of bounds: Goethe's 1788 play Egmont (English) (German) features Machiavelli as a character in a surprisingly-chill portrayal (he's Margaret of Parma's little guy!), Thomas Mann's short story "Schwere Stunde" is good, but 20th-century, and a must-read for Schoethe shippers, and César Aira's novella An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter develops a fascinating thesis on the interplay of colonialism, art and dehumanization.

And he recommended me a long forgotten German author. Which is really interesting on the one hand because I can finally read a book about places I know, a place I am currently living it

But boy! This book is exactly what I tried to avoid reading. Every woman is just stand in for the male author to reflect his problems on

How dare that woman to marry another men while the main male character is away for years? Not like a woman back then needed security and never promised him anything

How dare that woman to tell him to stop smoking. How can she not be thankful he blew off his finger to not join the military... for her

An idea must be able to become reality, or it is a vain bubble.