Fred Wander (1917–2006)
Auteur de The Seventh Well: A Novel
A propos de l'auteur
Crédit image: Fred Wander
Œuvres de Fred Wander
Pillantás Hollandiára 1 exemplaire
Doppeltes Antlitz Pariser Impressionen 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Wander, Fred
- Autres noms
- Rosenblatt, Fritz
- Date de naissance
- 1917-01-05
- Date de décès
- 2006-07-10
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- Austria
- Lieu de naissance
- Wien, Österreich
- Lieu du décès
- Wien, Österreich
- Lieux de résidence
- Paris, France
Kleinmachnow, Germany
Vienna, Austria - Professions
- author
Holocaust survivor
memoirist
newspaper reporter
photographer
novelist (tout afficher 7)
draftsman - Relations
- Wander, Maxie (Ehefrau)
- Prix et distinctions
- Literaturpreis der Stadt Wien (2006)
Theodor-Kramer-Preis (2003) - Courte biographie
- Fred Wander was the pen name of Fritz Rosenblatt, born to an Eastern European Jewish immigrant family in Vienna, Austria. He left school at age 14 and became an apprentice in a textile mill before traveling around Europe, taking odd jobs. He spent some time in Paris, where he first started to write fiction. In 1938, after Nazi Germany's Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, Wander escaped back to Paris via Switzerland. In 1939, after the start of World War II, he was interned at numerous transit camps by the French, and eventually sent back to Austria. From there, he was deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and later sent to the Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald concentration camps. Wander survived to be liberated by American troops in 1945. After two months recovering from tuberculosis and spotted fever, he returned to Vienna to find that his entire family, except for one brother, had been murdered in Auschwitz or Sobibor. He worked as a draftsman, photographer, and newspaper reporter. From 1958 to 1983, he lived in East Germany (GDR) with his wife, writer Maxie Wander. The couple had three children. He published his first book, Korsika noch nicht entdeckt, in 1958. His semi-autobiographical novel Der siebente brunnen: erzählung (English translation, The Seventh Well), now considered a classic of Holocaust literature, was first published in 1970 in the GDR and largely ignored. It was re-issued in German in 2005 and in English in 2008 to great acclaim, winning the 2009 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize in Britain. Following the death of his wife, Wander moved back to his native Vienna. He later remarried to Suzanne Wiedekind. In 2003, Wander received the Theodor Kramer Prize in Austria for writing in resistance and exile. He published a memoir, Das Gute Leben (The Good Life) originally in 1996; it was re-issued in 2006, the year of his death.
Membres
Critiques
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 9
- Aussi par
- 1
- Membres
- 170
- Popularité
- #125,474
- Évaluation
- 4.2
- Critiques
- 4
- ISBN
- 31
- Langues
- 7
I wanted to thank Karen for uploading the front cover.
Anyway, can one like, or dislike, a book that deals with the Holocaust, even if it does so at a sort of distance, as if behind the scenes?
Hôtel Baalbek is set in its namesake hotel in Marseille in July 1942. This hotel is the place where a series of immigrants, mostly Jewish, are lodging as they wait, dream and hope for an exit out of France before the Germans occupy the country fully.
To say that the setting is July 1942 (in fact, on the 14th, France’s National Day) is sort of misleading, since the narrator (who does not have a name but who is one of the immigrants – the author?), jumps backwards and forwards in time repeatedly. This has a weird and disorienting effect. On the one hand it diminishes some of the anxiety since we know that at least the narrator survives, but also accentuates an unnerving feeling of foreboding. What is the essence of the tragic after all, but the unrelenting approach to expected fatality?
There is not much of a story in Hôtel Baalbek. Rather, it presents us a gallery of people with different destinies waiting for them. Some succeed in escaping, some commit suicide, some go under and join the “résistance”, some are caught and assassinated on the spot, some are caught and taken to the camps and die, some are caught and taken to the camps and survive. One of this last, (luckier?), groups is obviously the narrator.
Hôtel Baalbek is signed by Fred Wander, but the writer’s real name was Fritz Rosenblatt. He was an Austrian writer who moved from Vienna to France in 1938, then escaped to Switzerland and was caught there by the Germans (yes, by the Nazis in Switzerland) and sent to Auschwitz first and then Buchenwald. He survived both the foot march and his stay in both places. His dates are 1917-2006. His march into hell obviously marked him, and he chose the verb of walking aimlessly as his pen-name, the wandering jew. After the war he settled in the GDR but eventually moved to Vienna before the fall of the Eastern Block. He was a journalist rather than a novelist, although he would have preferred to be considered the opposite. Hôtel Baalbek, together with the more famous [b:The Seventh Well|2307525|The Seventh Well|Fred Wander|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266718921s/2307525.jpg|2313939], are the only books of fiction (fiction?) that he left behind.
Yes, because fiction this book does not seem to be. It has a very strong flavor of an autobiographical account. From the little I have been able to learn from Wander’s life, many incidents of the book seem to match his life, even the capture of the narrator in Switzerland by the Nazis.
And this takes me to the loss of the fifth star in my rating, and the liking issue. This mixing of reality and fiction in an account related to the Holocaust seems to me very dangerous. In fact, I have come to feel a strong revulsion against novels and other works of fiction set in those terrifying times.
Do not mistake me, this is very far from the dreadful genre of sentimental, endearing and schmaltzy novels such as [b:The Boy in the Striped Pajamas|39999|The Boy in the Striped Pajamas|John Boyne|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320507879s/39999.jpg|1148702], and the not as awful but still pretty terrible [b:The Book Thief|19063|The Book Thief|Markus Zusak|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320456861s/19063.jpg|878368]. But I would have preferred a fully recognized autobiographical account. To introduce uncertainty in this category of writing is dangerous, if not reprehensible.
The DTV paperback edition has an interesting Postface by Erich Hackl. In it, Hackl discusses Wander’s disconcerting handling of time, which if not in the same category of the Modernists more contrived experiments with the structure of the novel, has a similar aim to recreate a nebulous human consciousness and our living in a mixed perception of past and present.
I am enclosing the link to the NYT review of his The Seventh Well. I am not sure I have the strength to read it. It deals with the experiences of living, dying or surviving, in the concentration camp. It is also fashioned as a novel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Hoffman-t.html
… (plus d'informations)