Lev's Book Tour in Austria & Germany (2005)
In 2005, my German publisher sent me on a two-week tour of Germany that started in Berlin and ended in Vienna. I did fourteen readings and talks about my first book in German, Das Deutsche Geld (The German Money), the story of three adults who are torn apart by their mother's death and the surprises in her Will. The Washington Post did a rave (I'm not exaggerating at all) and summed up the novel as "Kafka meets Philip Roth meets le Carré." Me, I don't know how many people I met in the cities mentioned above and Hanover, Dresden, Magdeburg, Ulm, Bochum, Braunschweig, Goettingen, Karlsruhe, and Stuttgart. I was always on the go, but struck wherever I went by people's kindness and their intense respect for literature, whether I read at a library, a school, a museum, or a bookstore. The photos below are in no particular order, but they reflect sights that caught my eye in the whirlwind that had me in a different city almost every day, and one day, two cities and an hour apart by train. The 2007 tour proved to be much less exhausting!
Lev's books in German
Some of the many half-timbered Renaissance-era buildings in the university town of Goettingen, where I spoke to teachers about my work and when I was done, they smacked their hands on the seminar tables by way of applause. It was very moving.
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Train tracks at Bergen-Belsen near Hanover where my grandfather died three days before the British liberated the camp, which my father survived. |
Stalinist buildings in a main square of Magdeburg, in former East Germany. It's the city where my mother was a slave laborer for the last eleven months of the war in Germany's largest armaments factory: Polte Fabrik.
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The remarkable Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which distorts perspective as you penetrate deeper, and in which people appear and disappear mysteriously, with sounds more and more muffled. |
The restored Reichstag with its new dome, on the day before German elections that resulted in Angela Merkel eventually taking power.
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A splendid library in Berlin where I did one of several readings in a city with an electricity all its own. |
German cigarette packages are pretty vivid. This one says that smoking can lead to an early and painful death. Another warned of sterility. |
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The spot in Berlin where Magnus Hirschfeld's sexology archives and libraries were burned by the Nazis and memorialized in many photographs of storm troopers burning books. |
One view of fabulous Heidelberg from the Castle Heights in the middle of Oktoberfest, where I sampled and bought a unique apple liqueur, and enjoyed the crowds.
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In Vienna, my Austrian agent took me to a famed restaurant known for the city's largest schnitzel. I acquitted myself well. |
For 200 years, Karslruhe Palace was the seat of the Baden dynasty. Destroyed in 1944 by bombing, it has been rebuilt, another piece of the ever-present WW II. |
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Das Deutsche Geld sharing the window of an Ulm book shop with Harry Potter. |
Einstein was from Ulm and so the city is filled with tributes to him of all kinds, many of them witty. |
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I was lucky to have a tour of several hours' length of Ulm in southwest Germany because the CEO of Parthas Verlag was from that city of lovely renaissance vistas like this one. |
All text copyright © 2001-09 by Lev Raphael.
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