An die Deutschen / To the Germans by Karl Wolfskehl - the first English translation

An die Deutschen / To the Germans

Karl Wolfskehl

Edited and translated by Friedrich Voit

and Andrew Paul Wood with illustrations by Barry Cleavin

Although Karl Wolfskehl was a significant German poet of the first half of the twentieth century, his work is not much known to English readers. Those who have read Frank Sargeson’s second volume of autobigraphy, More than Enough, will recall Sargeson’s vivid picture of this larger than life character, but it was not until 2012 when Holloway Press published a limited edition of poems Wolfskehl wrote while exiled from Nazi Germany in Auckland (Under New Stars: Poems of the New Zealand Exile, edited by Friedrich Voit, translated by Andrew Paul Wood, Margot Ruben, and Dean and Renate Koch), that an enormous gap in the availability of published translations of Wolfskehl’s work was filled.

Now Cold Hub Press has published the first English

translation of An die Deutschen / To the Germans in an inexpensive bilingual chapbook translated and edited with an introductory essay and extensive notes by Wolfskehl scholar Friedrich Voit and Christchurch translator Andrew Paul Wood. The book also includes six illustrations by renowned New Zealand printmaker Barry Cleavin.

This is perhaps Wolfskehl’s most important and most personal poem. Speaking as a German and as a Jew, Wolfskehl “addresses his fellow countrymen who were, as he accused them, in the process of betraying their cultural and humanistic heritage by adopting a crude racist ideology . . . . An die Deutschen / To the Germans remains a profound and moving poetic monument: it celebrates and commemorates in a personal and yet uniquely representative form the universal endurance and inspiring strength of the Human Spirit – in the face of ongoing threats through cultural barbarism and racism.”

The first version of the poem was written in 1933/4, shortly after Wolfskehl was forced into exile from Germany. It was completed in 1944, in New Zealand, where he found asylum in 1938. He died as a New Zealand citizen in 1948.

  

An die Deutschen / To the Germans

is a 44pp softcover chapbook - $19.50

published by Cold Hub Press.

www.coldhubpress.co.nz