Photo de l'auteur

Fred Wander (1917–2006)

Auteur de The Seventh Well: A Novel

9+ oeuvres 170 utilisateurs 4 critiques

A propos de l'auteur

Comprend les noms: Fred Wander

Crédit image: Fred Wander

Œuvres de Fred Wander

The Seventh Well: A Novel (1987) — Auteur — 144 exemplaires
Hotel Baalbek (1994) 9 exemplaires
Das gute Leben. Erinnerungen. (2006) 6 exemplaires
Ein Zimmer in Paris (1976) 5 exemplaires
Pillantás Hollandiára (1974) 2 exemplaires
Bandidos (1966) 1 exemplaire
Provenzalische Reise (1978) 1 exemplaire

Oeuvres associées

Tagebücher und Briefe (1979) — Directeur de publication, quelques éditions72 exemplaires

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

I bought this book in Dussman in Berlin a couple of years ago because it was on their Recommendations shelf (Lese Tipp), yet I am the first one to review it in GR, which says something about how, in spite of GR’s international growth, the site still remains very “Anglo”.

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)
 
Signalé
KalliopeMuse | Apr 2, 2013 |
Fred Wander, born to Jewish Galician parents in Vienna in 1917, he was deported as a young man to a series of French work camps and survived the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. After the war he eventually settled in East Germany, where he made a new life as a reporter and photographer. It was only in the late 1960s, after his 10-year-old daughter died in an accident, that he began to revisit his past.
The result was The Seventh Well, a novel narrated by a young man who attempts to maintain his own sanity in the death camps by immersing himself in the lives of his fellow prisoners. The anonymous narrator undergoes a sort of spiritual education as he studies the doomed men and boys around him. The result is an indirect portrait of a man trying to grasp an unthinkable trauma.
This a powerful and harrowing collection of memories from Fred Wander's life spent in 20 different Nazi camps in France, Poland and Germany from 1942 to 1945.
Wander himself said, "It's not possible to say anything about so many millions of dead. But three or four individuals, it might be possible to tell a story about." He has done this and it is a powerful work of art.

Something in him is driven to yell out: I am human! I have known respect! he wants to cry out. I was loved, I had a home, a wife and children, friends. I have performed kindnesses and not asked for reward. I have seen marvellous things, I know the smell of old cities. I could have done anything, achieved everything, and if I didn’t do or achieve, then it was only because I didn’t know, I couldn’t sense…

Did you know my Zikmund?” I heard a Jew ask the man in the next bunk to him. “No, you didn’t know my Zikmund, because he was not himself when he came with me to the camp. Because he lost his mind when he saw them killing his mother. A heart like a glass bell, a light crack, and it doesn’t ring anymore…
… (plus d'informations)
4 voter
Signalé
curlysue | 2 autres critiques | May 17, 2012 |
"Fred Wander, who died in Vienna in 2006 at the age of ninety, was a survivor of some twenty concentration camps, but is was not until the death of his only daughter in 1970 that his recollections finally poured forth in the form of this harrowing work of fictions, first published in East Germany. In fevered cadences evoking Primo Levi and Paul Celan, Wander ultimately demonstrates that the survival of a single man is a collaborative enterprise, and in so doing he exalts the lives of the departed with this transcendent novel." From back cover of the book.… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
HolocaustMuseum | 2 autres critiques | May 1, 2013 |

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Statistiques

Œuvres
9
Aussi par
1
Membres
170
Popularité
#125,474
Évaluation
4.2
Critiques
4
ISBN
31
Langues
7

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