Angel continues its voyage of rediscovery . . .
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Georg Heym
PoemsJanuary 2012 marks the centenary of the death, by drowning at the age of 24, of one of the major figures of early German modernism – the poet and short story writer Georg Heym, a member of the brilliant ‘Expressionist’ generation that included the painters Emil Nolde, Franz Marc and Wassili Kandinsky and the young poets who were to die in the First World War like Alfred Lichtenstein, Ernst Stadler and Georg Trakl. …more
‘Georg Heym was an authentic prodigy … It is a great thing to have him in English, in the patient and scrupulous translations of Antony Hasler, who has worked on these poems for 20 years.’ – Michael Hofmann, The Guardian -
Georg Heym
The Thief and other storiesThe tales that Heym wrote in the last year of his life, the most powerful in German literature since Kleist, have a strong gothic flavour and prefigure the great era of the Expressionist film. An ageing, Apocalypse-crazed dropout who sees it as his God-given mission to steal and cut up the Mona Lisa, a sweet moment of memory in a corpse lying opened for autopsy, a released maniac who journeys homeward to murder his wife, …more
‘It’s not subtle, this nihilist ferocity that’s like an angered Kafka, but the punchy phantasmagoria is as good as a fix of Murnau or early Fritz Lang movies.’ – The Observer


