(np) Hubert Fichte

Wed Nov 5 05:43:46 CST 2014

Taking the "(np)" out of this thread, let me hint at the fact that the 
title of the book "Petersilie" refers to the "Perejil Massacre" which 
gets mentioned on page 16 of "Bleeding Edge".

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mau-Petersilie-Die-afroamerikanischen-Religionen-III-Bildband-Texte-H-Fichte-/361088434421
>
> The death of the translator Martin Chalmers (RIP) brought to my 
> attention that Hubert Fichte's third novel - Detlevs Imitationen 
> "Grünspan" [1971] -, in my opinion among his very best, is available 
> in English. You may check this out!
>
> http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2315574.Detlev_s_Imitations
>
> Set in Hamburg, this novel traces the life of a half-Jewish boy who 
> survives the Hamburg firestorms of 1943 to become a child actor and 
> later an exponent of gay culture and student revolt.
>
> https://sites.google.com/site/germanliterature/20th-century/fichte
>
> *Hubert Fichte* is certainly the most underrated and arguably one of 
> the greatest German-language authors of the period between 1945 and 
> 1989. He was born to a Jewish father in 1935; he died at the height of 
> the AIDS epidemic in 1986. In between he produced over 50 books and 
> several hundred articles, interviews, features, and other texts in 
> which he not only minutely observes his own West German reality, but 
> also extends it to encompass virtually the whole of the black diaspora 
> as represented by the syncretic religions, and compares it with the 
> experiences of an astonishing range of other people, from Presidents 
> to prostitutes, from across the globe.
> Although he is often treated as an outsider, Fichte in fact made 
> unique and outstanding contributions to each of the main trends and 
> tendencies of his time. His first collection of short stories, /Der 
> Aufbruch nach Turku (Escaping to Turku)/ 1963 gives a new twist to the 
> pared down prose of the so-called ‘Kahlschlag’. His first novel /Das 
> Waisenhaus (The Orphanage)/ (1965) is a novel of National Socialism 
> which engages critically with the tendency of 
> /Vergangenheitsbewältigung/ or ‘overcoming the past’ by showing how 
> totalitarianism is endemic in the way individuals and hierarchies use 
> language. With/Die Palette (The Palette)/ (1968) he rode the wave of 
> Pop literature and created a bestseller which can also be read as a 
> big city novel, an underground novel, and an outstanding example of 
> the linguistic experimentation of the time. /Detlevs Imitationen 
> “Grünspan” (Detlev’s Imitations)/ (1971) brilliantly refutes Sebald’s 
> peculiar thesis that the Germans had not written about the bombing of 
> their cities and turns completely inside out the so-called ‘search for 
> identity’ which literary historians see as the dominant theme of the 
> decade. In his /Interviews aus dem Palais d’Amour/ (1972) and /Wolli 
> Indienfahrer/ (1978) he extends the scope of documentary literature to 
> the world of pimps and prostitutes, noting in the latter title the 
> new-found fad for travel to the third world. In /Versuch über die 
> Pubertät (Essay on Puberty)/ (1975) he cocks a snook at the so-called 
> ‘new subjectivity’ by counterpointing his own puberty with the rituals 
> of the Afro-American religions and the torture of political prisoners 
> in Latin America. And in /Hans Eppendorfer, Der Ledermann spricht mit 
> Hubert Fichte (Hans Eppendorfer, the Leather-Man Talking to Hubert 
> Fichte)/ (1977) he straddles the genres of interview, radio feature 
> and theatre play while engaging in complicated ways with the topical 
> themes of justice, violence, sexuality and sensationalism.
> In 1976 Fichte and his partner, the photographer Leonore Mau 
> (1916-2013), produced the first of three two-volume multi-media 
> projects, which make much (West German) literature seem narrowly 
> parochial. /Xango/ (1976), /Petersilie (Parsley)/ (1981) and the 
> posthumous /Psyche/ (1990 and 2005) use photographs, newspaper items, 
> diary entries, excerpts from interviews, lists, litanies, statistics, 
> fragments of narrative, dialogue, and discursive prose, together with 
> a variety of other forms to create a carefully structured open montage 
> which seeks not to recolonize the ritual remains of the religions of 
> Africa as preserved in the black diaspora, but to document the process 
> by which a white writer and a white photographer seek to come to terms 
> with the experience of researching them. The questions raised – about 
> tourism, dictatorship and constellations of exploitation, about 
> ethnographic research and the dangers of monologic thinking, about 
> magic and rationalism, knowledge and power, and about the unspoken 
> sexual component in all these debates, are if anything even more 
> urgently relevant now than they were then. And the form in which they 
> are cast uncannily prefigures post-colonial debates about hybridity, 
> subaltern speech and the third space.
> Meanwhile, Fichte had started work on an auto-fictional project which 
> makes the recollections of his contemporaries seem virtually 
> unreadable. The posthumous /Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit/ 
> (1986-2006) is a /History of Sensitivity/ understood as: a quality of 
> photographic paper and other recording instruments; a quality of human 
> interaction opposed to the heteropatriarchal imperialist history of 
> domination and subjugation; a quality of an individual endowed by 
> circumstances (a Jewish father, a non heteronormative sexuality) with 
> unusually raw nerves and acute perceptions; and a quality of the human 
> body which enables it to respond to pain and tenderness alike. The 
> work published under this title offers all the pleasures of a good 
> autobiography: gossip and pen-portraits, insights into the genesis and 
> reception of literary works, an alternative narrative to set alongside 
> the fiction, forthright opinions and a full-blown family romance. 
> Almost by accident it includes collections of Fichte’s award-winning 
> Radio Plays (/Schulfunk – Schools Broadcasting/, 1990) and of his 
> feisty literary criticism (/Homosexualität und Literatur – 
> Homosexuality and Literature/, 1987 & 1988). But it also engages, in a 
> characteristically subversive manner, with a wide variety of familiar 
> themes: the tourist novel (/Eine Glückliche Liebe – A Happy Romance/, 
> 1988), (/Forschungsbericht – Research Report/, 1989), the parent novel 
> (/Geschichte der Nanã – Story of Nanã/, 1989), the novel of Islam 
> (/Platz der Gehenkten – Hanged Men’s Square/, 1989), the Third World 
> novel (/Explosion/, 1993), the New York novel (/Die schwarze Stadt – 
> The Black City/, 1990), the Hamburg novel (/Der kleine Hauptbahnhof 
> oder Lob des Strichs – The Little Central Station or in Praise of 
> Renting/, 1990), the Pop novel (/Lil’s Book/, 1991) and the AIDS novel 
> (/Hamburg Hauptbahnhof. Register – Hamburg Central Station. Index/, 
> 1995). It also contains programmatic and explicit accounts of the 
> encounters its bisexual subject has with both men and a woman. Like 
> /Xango/, /Petersilie/ and /Psyche/, it deliberately adopts multiple 
> perspectives and makes use of a variety of found material, including 
> whole works by Fichte himself. Mercilessly honest and acutely 
> self-aware, it is constantly relativizing statements made and 
> positions adopted, and never allows the point of view to reify. Indeed 
> it works tirelessly to subvert precisely the kind of imperialism 
> predicated on being unironically right. To that extent, the 
> /Geschichte/, like the rest of Fichte’s oeuvre can be seen as being 
> indicatively, and thoroughly, queer.
> *English Translations*
> Hubert Fichte, /The Orphanage/, trans. by Martin Chalmers (London: 
> Serpent’s Tail, 1990)
> Hubert Fichte, /Detlev’s Imitations/, trans. by Martin Chalmers 
> (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992)
> Hubert Fichte, /The Gay Critic/, trans. by Kevin Gavin, intro. by 
> James W. Jones (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996)
> *Further Reading in English*
> Robert Gillett, ‘On not Writing Pornography: Literary 
> Self-Consciousness in the Work of Hubert Fichte’, /German Life and 
> Letters/ 48:2 (1995), 222-40
> Robert Gillett, ‘An Index and Its Chronicle: Hubert Fichte’s Hamburg 
> (Hauptbahnhof)’, in /Cityscapes and Countryside in Contemporary German 
> Literature/, ed. by Julian Preece and Osman Durrani (Bradford Series 
> of Colloquia on German Literature, Bd. 8) (Oxford and Bern: Peter 
> Lang, 2004), pp. 67-83
> Robert Gillett, ‘Fichte: /Detlevs Imitationen „Grünspan/“’, in 
> /Landmarks in the German Novel 2/, ed. by Peter Hutchinson and Michael 
> Minden (Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 43-60
> Robert Gillett, ‘Writing queer performance: Hubert Fichte's inimitable 
> /Imitations/’, /Sexualities/ 15:1 (2012), 42-52
> Christian Gundermann, ‘Hubert Fichte 1935-1986’, in/Encyclopedia of 
> German Literature/, ed. by Matthias Konzett (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 
> 2000), vol. 1, pp. 286-87
> B. Martin Kane, ‘A Note on Hubert Fichte’s New Novel’, /20th Century 
> Studies/ (December 1969), 106-08
> Craig B. Palmer, ‘Fichte, Hubert’, in /The Gay and Lesbian Literary 
> Heritage. A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from 
> Antiquity to the Present/, ed. by Claude J. Summers (New York: Henry 
> Holt, 1995), p. 271
> Debbie Pinfold, ‘The Tainted Voice: Hubert Fichte’s /Das Waisenhaus’/, 
> in Debbie Pinfold, /The Child’s View of the Third Reich in German 
> Literature: The Eye among the Blind/ (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2001), 
> pp. 199-203
> Jeffrey L. Sammons, ‘Hamburg Dropouts. Hubert Fichte, /Die Palette’/, 
> /Novel/ 2:3 (Spring 1969), 280-28
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> On the photographer Leonore Mau, Fichte's artistic partner and wife, 
> see here:
> http://www.urbanautica.com/post/79451401890/the-second-sight-of-leonore-mau
>

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