Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Keillor, H. 2012 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Published when the author was just twenty-three, Life Goes On was Hans Keilson's literary debut, an extraordinary autobiographical novel that paints a dark yet illuminating portrait of Germany between the world wars. It is the story of Herr Seldersen--a Jewish store owner modeled on Keilson's father, a textile merchant and decorated World War I veteran--along with his wife and son, Albrecht, and the troubles they encounter as the German economy collapses and politics turn rancid.
The book was banned by the Nazis in 1934. Shortly afterward, following his editor's advice, Keilson emigrated to the Netherlands, where he would spend the rest of his life.
Life Goes On is an essential volume for readers of Keilson's later work. At the age of one hundred, with his one copy of the first edition of Life Goes On in hand, Keilson told The New York Times that he would love to see his first novel reissued, and translated as well. "Then you would have my whole biography," he told them. He died at the age of one hundred and one.
Author Notes
Hans Keilson was born in Bad Freienwalde, Germany on December 12, 1909. He studied medicine in Berlin, but was unable to practice as a doctor because of Nazi laws. His first book, Life Goes On, offered a dark picture of German political life between the wars and was banned by the Nazis in 1934.
Two years later, he emigrated to the Netherlands with his future wife. He established a pediatric practice, but lived in a separate house from his wife, a Roman Catholic, on the same street. He began a new novel, The Death of the Adversary, about a young Jewish man's experiences in Germany as the Nazis gain a grip on power, but he put the manuscript aside after the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 forced him into hiding. When his daughter was born in 1941, his wife said that the father was a German soldier.
Soon after the German occupation, he joined a resistance organization and spent the rest of the war, travelling the country under the name Van den Linden and counseling Jewish children and teenagers separated from their parents and living underground. This work motivated him to train as a psychoanalyst.
After the war, he helped found an organization to care for and treat Jewish orphans who had survived the Holocaust. His experiences in hiding provided the material for the novella Comedy in a Minor Key, about a Dutch couple who shelter an elderly Jew who dies of natural causes. After carelessly disposing of the body, they too must go into hiding. It was published in 1947. He resumed writing The Death of the Adversary and it was published in 1959. Although the novel sold well and Time magazine named it one of the top 10 books of the year, he slipped into literary obscurity and wrote no more fiction. In 1979 he completed his dissertation, Sequential Traumatization in Children, which was a groundbreaking work on the effects of the war on orphaned and displaced Jewish children in the Netherlands.
In 2007 a literary translator came across Comedy in a Minor Key and mounted a successful campaign to resurrect Keilson's works. In 2010, his translations of The Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key were published in Great Britain and the United States. Keilson died on May 31, 2011 at the age of 101.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Stunningly accomplished and self-assured for such a young writer this novel, published initially in 1933 when Keilson was in his early 20s, gives a haunting portrait of Germany between the two world wars. The Seldersens have a small clothing shop, which they've owned for 25 years. Now the economy is awful and business extremely slow. Their solemn and studious son, Albrecht, is 16. Albrecht's friend, Fritz, is the opposite: physically strong, a fine athlete with an outgoing personality; his father, a plumber, has been working since the age of 14. Both Fritz's parents and Albrecht's are determined that their sons have everything needed for a brilliant future. But the future is in doubt for just about everyone. Hundreds of workers at a local factory lose their jobs because of a fire. The economy is dreadful not just locally but everywhere. Debt and worry take a heavy toll on the Seldersens, and they, like the others around them, feel an overwhelming sense of shame. Meanwhile, Albrecht goes off to university in Berlin while Fritz grows increasingly despairing as he tries to find his way among the diminished opportunities around him in an atmosphere where there was "powerful, deadly exhaustion in the air." Both methodical and acutely sensitive, this book is a wonderful achievement. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The first English language publication of this German author's 1933 autobiographical first novel; Keilson (1909-2011) charts the slow decline of a shopkeeper in the Weimar Republic. Life has been an uphill struggle for Herr Seldersen, as he is called. He started out as a traveling salesman before setting up his clothing store. Then came the Great War. He survived unharmed, but the decorated veteran next had to deal with the nightmare of hyperinflation. In 1928, when the novel opens, the economy has steadied somewhat, but there are still challenges. His landlord and competitor has his eye on his store and pressures Seldersen to move into less-attractive premises. A good-hearted, unambitious man, he cherishes his small town in Prussia, eastern Germany, but peace and quiet are elusive for this German counterpart of Willy Loman. He is caught in a vise between his demanding suppliers and his impoverished customers, buying on credit. It's death by a thousand cuts. There's no disguising the situation from his wife or his 16-year-old son, Albrecht. The details about bills of exchange can get boring, but there is real pathos in his son's attempt to console his father ("old, lost, hopeless"). Albrecht's coming-of-age, and that of his best friend, Fritz, is the secondary storyline. Fritz is a free spirit, a high-school dropout with soaring ambitions who will be crushed by the lack of opportunity. The more restrained Albrecht, meanwhile, is strongly influenced by a young judge, who believes in the life of the mind. A Zola-esque naturalism is the strong suit of a novel that is more than just a period piece.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this autobiographical first novel, Keilson captures the mood of Germany after WWI as the country's economy collapses, its politics turn ugly, and the prospects for its citizens darken. Herr Seldersen returns unharmed from the Great War to continue operating his textile shop only to find his customers losing jobs and his trade dwindling. Despite his strict financial management, the shopkeeper's business continues in a downward spiral, and his despair deepens. Meanwhile, Seldersen's son, Albrecht, a university student in Berlin who suffers with his parents and watches the repeated failures of his best friend, feels adrift in the world and comes to believe that his only escape from a sense of shame is to become political. Banned in Germany in 1934, the year after it was published, this novel is unrelentingly depressing in describing the climate in which Nazism began to flourish. Together with Keilson's other two novels (Comedy in a Minor Key,1947, and The Death of the Adversary, 1959), reprinted in English translation in 2010, this book illuminates the entire life of the renowned author, who died, at age 101, in 2011.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Born in 1909, Keilson (Comedy in a Minor Key), practiced medicine in his native Germany until the Nuremberg laws forced him out, then fled to the Netherlands. Aside from his work as a novelist, he is renowned for his work with traumatized children after the war. His first novel, written at age 23 and only now translated into English, is the largely autobiographical account following the lives of the Seldersen family during the interwar period. Herr and Frau Seldersen have a formerly successful store that is increasingly losing customers as economic conditions in their small town and throughout Germany deteriorate. Their son, Albrecht, is a somewhat impassive but sympathetic observer of his family's decline as well as of the political unrest that shakes the nation in the lead up to the Nazi takeover. The pace is leisurely and at times the action seems to unfold in real time, but it builds to a moving conclusion. VERDICT Smoothly and ably translated by Searls, this work has considerable historical interest as an eyewitness account of interwar economic depression and the rise of the Nazis, who banned it. The bleak picture it paints should resonate with readers who are interested in world historical events, in this case the recently souring Western economies. [See Prepub Alert, 4/9/12.]-Edward Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.