The Turbulent World of Franz Goll : : An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century / / Peter Fritzsche.
Franz Göll was a thoroughly typical Berliner. He worked as a clerk, sometimes as a postal employee, night watchman, or publisher's assistant. He enjoyed the movies, ate spice cake, wore a fedora, tamed sparrows, and drank beer or schnapps. He lived his entire life in a two-room apartment in Rot...
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Superior document: | Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter E-BOOK GESAMTPAKET / COMPLETE PACKAGE 2011 |
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Place / Publishing House: | Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2011] ©2011 |
Year of Publication: | 2011 |
Language: | English |
Online Access: | |
Physical Description: | 1 online resource :; 25 halftones |
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Other title: | Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. The Case of Franz Göll, Graphomaniac -- 2. Franz Göll's Multiple Selves -- 3. Physical Intimacies -- 4. The Amateur Scientist -- 5. Franz Göll Writes German History -- 6. Resolution without Redemption -- Notes. Index -- Notes -- Index |
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Summary: | Franz Göll was a thoroughly typical Berliner. He worked as a clerk, sometimes as a postal employee, night watchman, or publisher's assistant. He enjoyed the movies, ate spice cake, wore a fedora, tamed sparrows, and drank beer or schnapps. He lived his entire life in a two-room apartment in Rote Insel, Berlin's famous working-class district. What makes Franz Göll different is that he left behind one of the most comprehensive diaries available from the maelstrom of twentieth-century German life. Deftly weaving in Göll's voice from his diary entries, Fritzsche narrates the quest of an ordinary citizen to make sense of a violent and bewildering century.Peter Fritzsche paints a deeply affecting portrait of a self-educated man seized by an untamable impulse to record, who stayed put for nearly seventy years as history thundered around him. Determined to compose a "symphony" from the music of everyday life, Göll wrote of hungry winters during World War I, the bombing of Berlin, the rape of his neighbors by Russian soldiers in World War II, and the flexing of U.S. superpower during the Reagan years. In his early entries, Göll grappled with the intellectual shockwaves cast by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, and later he struggled to engage with the strange lifestyles that marked Germany's transition to a fluid, dynamic, unmistakably modern society.With expert analysis, Fritzsche shows how one man's thoughts and desires can give poignant shape to the collective experience of twentieth-century life, registering its manifold shocks and rendering them legible. |
Format: | Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web. |
ISBN: | 9780674060951 9783110261189 9783110261233 9783110261257 9783110374889 9783110374926 9783110442205 9783110459517 9783110662566 |
DOI: | 10.4159/harvard.9780674060951 |
Access: | restricted access |
Hierarchical level: | Monograph |
Statement of Responsibility: | Peter Fritzsche. |