Franz Fühmann

This work is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, 'The Jew Car', left off, Fühmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions - Nazism, then socialism - and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses.