Georg
translated by Carl Skoggard

Best remembered today for his exploration of early German cinema (From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film), Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) was the editor for cultural affairs at Germany’s leading liberal newspaper during the Weimar Republic until its disastrous end. His Georg is a panorama of those years as seen through the eyes of a rookie reporter working for the fictional Morgenbote ('Morning Herald'). In a defeated nation seething with extremism right and left, young Georg is looking for something to believe in. For him, the past has become unusable; for nearly everyone he meets, paradise seems just around the corner. But which paradise? Kracauer’s grimly funny novel takes on a confused and dangerous time which can remind us of our own. The style is briskly cinematic.

To read Carl's previously unpublished essay, "Kracauer's Novels: An Introdution," on Georg and Ginster, follow this link to where it is added to the beginning of Georg: https://issuu.com/publicationstudionetworklib/docs/georg_with_essay

Carl Skoggard was trained as a musicologist and for many years served as an editor for the music bibliography Repértoire International de la Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York, where he was responsible for German materials. More recently he was also the staff writer for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, an award-winning magazine created by his partner Joseph Holtzman.

Over the last decade Skoggard has prepared translations with extensive commentary for the three major autobiographically-oriented writings of the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. His bilingual edition of Benjamin’s Sonnets has made this little-known but important body of poetry available to readers of English for the first time.