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• Alice - 2011 Clerkenwell Press, London, England
• Where Love Begins - 2017 Clerkenwell Press, London, England
• Letti Park - 2018 Clerkenwell Press, London, England

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  Judith Hermann
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  Judith Hermann

  Judith Hermann (2007)
  Born
  May 15, 1970 (age 47)
  West Berlin, Germany
  Occupation
  Writer
  Residence
  Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin
  Nationality
  German
  Period
  late 20th-early 21st century
  Genre
  short stories and the novel
  Notable works
  Sommerhaus, später (1997)
  Notable awards
  Kleist Prize
  2001
  Judith Hermann (born May 15, 1970) is a German author. She has published several books of short stories and her first novel was published in 2014. She is a leading figure of the Fräuleinwunder ("girl wonder") of women writers.

  Contents [hide]
  1
  Life
  2
  Works
  3
  Films
  4
  References
  5
  External links

  Life[edit]
  Hermann was born in St. Joseph's hospital in West Berlin. She grew up in the West Berlin neighborhood of Neukölln and remained there until the mid-nineties, when she moved to the district of Prenzlauer Berg in the former East Berlin.
  She holds a master's degree in German and Philosophy and attended the Berliner Journalistenschule, a highly selective professional academy for journalists. During this training she did an internship with the German language newspaper Aufbau in New York. While she was in America she worked on some of her first literary texts and realized that short stories were "her" genre. In an interview she explained that her training as a journalist helped her to write concisely, although she knew that journalism was not suitable for her.[1]
  After returning to Berlin, she worked briefly as a free-lance journalist before she was awarded the Alfred-Döblin stipend from the Academy of Arts, Berlin in 1997. Recipients of this stipend are financed for three to twelve months while they live and work in the Alfred-Döblin House in Wewelsfleth.
  In 1998 her first volume of short stories, Sommerhaus, später, was celebrated by critics, who felt they had discovered in her work the "sound of a new generation" (Spiegel 12/1999). Hermann quickly became a leading figure of the Fräuleinwunder ("girl wonder"), a term coined by German literary critic Volker Hage of Spiegel that grouped together female authors like Jenny Erpenbeck, Felicitas Hoppe, Zoe Jenny, Juli Zeh and Julia Franck who were gaining success at the time. Although "Fräulein" is an old fashioned term, not politically correct, and rejected by the authors themselves, the term worked well as a marketing tool and has been adopted in Literary Criticism.[2] Judith Hermann received both the Hugo Ball Prize and the Bremer Literatur-Förderpreis. In 2001 she was awarded with the Kleist Prize.
  Her second collection of stories, Nichts als Gespenster, followed in 2003, but to some extent was unable to fulfill the high expectations of critics. In 2009, her latest collection of short stories, Alice, was published. Alice comprises five connected stories about the death of five men, each story sharing a common protagonist, Alice. Iris Radisch, a famous critic for the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit titled her review of Hermann's book "Das große Männersterben" (The death of many men).[3] Despite the melancholic subject, these stories are also about life must go on after death. In this respect, Alice is different from her earlier works, which had a much darker tone.
  Hermann's most recent work, her first novel Aller Liebe Anfang, was published in 2014. It depicts a stalking scenario, in which the protagonist Stella is terrorized by a neighbor, Mister Pfister, when she is alone in her home during the day while her husband and daughter are at work and school. Mister Pfister appears one day on Stella's doorstep, wishing to speak with her and, after being denied, becomes fixated on her, leaving increasingly encroaching and aggressive messages in her mailbox and threatening to destroy her quiet family life. Hermann's novel is chilling, in part because of the restrained language she employs and in part because the stalking scenario nods to contemporary social fears about security and vulnerability.
  Works[edit]
  Summerhouse, later (2001, HarperCollins) ISBN 0-06-000686-2
  Sommerhaus, später (1998, S. Fischer) ISBN 3-596-14770-0
  Nothing but ghosts (2005, Fourth Estate) ISBN 0-00-717455-1
  Nichts als Gespenster (2003, S. Fischer) ISBN 3-596-15798-6
  Alice (2009, S. Fischer) ISBN 978-3-10-033182-3
  Aller Liebe Anfang (2014, S. Fischer) ISBN 978-3-10-033183-0
  Films[edit]
  Eisblumenfarm (based on "Sommerhaus, später")
  Short-film by Dominik Betz (2004); with Philip Hellmann, Sara Hilliger, Gunnar Solka
  Freundinnen
  Short-film by Tobias Stille (2005); with Anneke Kim Sarnau, Regina Stötzel, Murat Yilmaz
  Nichts als Gespenster
  Drama by Martin Gypkens (2006); with August Diehl, Chiara Schoras, Fritzi Haberlandt

• Goethe Institute Website - https://www.goethe.de/en/kul/lit/20365757.html

  QUOTED: "From Alice, 'Richard', because it’s so inconspicuous, because nothing more happens and yet, in this story, the stories take a turn, the book starts to become lighter. And in and for itself perhaps 'Micha', because it was after 'Micha' that I decided to write the book Alice in the first place."

  An Interview with Judith Hermann
  “Lots of Riddles” – The Fascination of Short Stories

  Since her debut volume “Summerhouse, later” (“Sommerhaus, später”, 1998), Judith Hermann has been acclaimed as a master of the short story. In the meantime she has published two more collections of stories: “Nothing But Ghosts” (“Nichts als Gespenster”, 2003) and “Alice” (2009). In an interview she reveals how her short stories originate.

  Judith Hermann | © Cordula Giese
  Mrs. Hermann, what is the fascination of short story writing for you?
  Most of all perhaps the incomplete, the vague – the open end. In short story writing the story mainly begins after the story. The story is over and at the same time begins in the head of the reader; the reader has to finish the story himself.
  There’s nothing of the know-it-all about the short story. It asserts little and usually has no moral. It leaves things in the air. I like that as a reader and also as a writer, perhaps because deciding things is so difficult for me, perhaps because in writing a short story I don’t have to decide on a particular ending.
  But somehow every story has to come to an end …
  Of course, every short story has an ending, but this ending often raises more questions than it answers. Short story writing seeks to fix a moment. Life is full of such tiny moments that we want to salvage and that apparently harbor a mystery, their own great significance. Lots of riddles. Short stories are enigmatic; perhaps they also challenge us a bit. A reader once told me that at the end of every story she stands there in the rain – not a pleasant feeling, but for me an apt and beautiful image.
  Have you always liked to read short stories?
  Yes. I like the moment after the story, looking up from the book back into reality, the question of what the characters will do now, what will become of them. When I’ve finished reading a story, I can begin to locate the characters in my reality, to see whether I really know them, whether I know something about them. This happens without the book, in my head, freehand so to say. A novel accompanies the reader, it doesn’t let him go so soon. That’s also beautiful, but perhaps reading and thinking about a short story is freer.
  Did you deliberately choose to write short stories.
  Katja Lange-Müller once said that not the author decides about the length of a text, but rather the text does. And that’s true! In the best case the text takes on a life of its own and all by itself leads the writer to its ending. The ending then often comes unexpectedly and usually sooner than you thought it would.
  When I began writing, I didn’t think about whether I wanted to write short stories or a novel. I wanted to tell a certain story and had no idea how long I would need to do so. My first story became a short story, and all the others afterwards. I’d have nothing against it if a text I was writing decided to turn out longer. But it doesn’t, and I think what I have to tell is so small that it would get lost in a novel.
  How do your stories originate?
  Each story has an autobiographical core, sometimes an image, a moment, sometimes a sentence that I hear. And I have the feeling that this sentence has a subtext, a double bottom, a second, important meaning. I note the sentence, and sometimes it grows into a story.
  I find a character that could say the sentence, then another character to whom it could be said. And then there is a kind of backwards movement, the threads of the story unravel. I find the table where these two characters are sitting, the room where the table stands, the street outside the window, the reason that they’re there together, the reason for their parting. I need names; the names of the characters are like keys to the text. I need a title and a first sentence. And when I have all this, I attempt to set off. It’s like a small expedition for which I have to be fitted out. Sometimes then I get through – into the story, through it and back safely.
  How do the short stories come together in one volume?
  Yes – although I write short stories, they still belong together, as if, together, they then had to attempt to be a longer text. With all three of my books, after a certain number of stories I thought: This is now a book; these stories are enough and there won’t be another one for now. The stories are also all written one after the other; they belong to a time in my life.
  Which stories are your favorites?
  From Sommerhaus, später , probably “Sonja”. Perhaps because it’s so romantic. From Nichts als Gespenster “Kaltblau” (Cold Blue); I have the feeling that it’s a good short story. From Alice „Richard“, because it’s so inconspicuous, because nothing more happens and yet, in this story, the stories take a turn, the book starts to become lighter. And in and for itself perhaps “Micha”, because it was after “Micha” that I decided to write the book Alice in the first place.

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/26/judith-hermann-edinburgh-intenrational-book-festival

  Judith Hermann: "I think as little as possible about what I'm writing"
  German short story writer Judith Hermann talks about being drawn to death as a way of reflecting on life - and why it doesn't matter to her where her stories come from

  Judith Hermann: 'This is not a book about dying but about living'

  Richard Lea

  @richardlea
  Friday 26 August 2011 12.04 BST
  First published on Friday 26 August 2011 12.04 BST

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  alking through the restrained elegance of Edinburgh's Charlotte Square towards Judith Hermann's hotel, a scene from her latest book, Alice, comes irresistibly to mind.
  Alice has arranged to meet the former lover of an uncle who committed suicide just before she was born, almost 40 years before. She arrives at the hotel where he is staying and asks the clerk at reception to call up to the room to say she's there. "Alice knew that Frederick, sitting in the armchair next to the suddenly ringing telephone must have flinched in shock," Hermann writes. "Even though he had been waiting for it to ring. Just because of that."
  But Hermann is not waiting in her room today – I'm a little early, so I wait for her in the lobby. When she arrives she waves away the notion that she might have been avoiding such a moment herself, that a call from reception on this occasion would have troubled her in the slightest.

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  Tall, smart, her hair scraped back behind her head, Hermann sits her chair with such an air of self-possession that the idea her composure could be disturbed by something so banal seems suddenly ridiculous. After all, she continues, "Frederick is waiting in a particular way".
  Hermann is in Edinburgh as one of two authors published in the launch season of a new imprint, The Clerkenwell Press. Alice is the third book of short fiction the German writer has produced, after 1998's The Summer House, Later and 2003's Nothing But Ghosts. It consists of five interlinked short stories, each of which brings Alice face to face with mortality. Death comes unexpectedly in Tuscany, with agonising slowness in a town near Germany's border with France, after meticulous planning in Berlin, but it is always there.
  In one story, Alice sits at the bedside of a former lover who is in a morphine daze, turned toward the window "like a plant", while an old, wrinkled nun asks "what sort of man he had been" – a question which confronts her with her inability to explain a life.
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  She stops to buy an ice cream at a petrol pump on her way back from the hospital, but her friend is not "doing much better", as the doctors have assured her; instead his heart has "fibrillated and stopped beating, just like that, and no goodbye". He has specified "No sermon by the minister" at his funeral and "sandwiches with plum jam, meatballs and beer" for after.
  But despite the number of deaths it describes, Hermann insists that this "not a book about dying, it's a book about living," More particularly, she insists with a penetrating stare, it's about "living while somebody is dying."
  Like all her stories, Alice grew out of an "autobiographical kernel", a moment from her own life which she wanted to explore. The last five years have been "filled with loss" of various kinds, though she is quick to close off discussion of what those losses might have been. For an author born in 1970 it's "totally normal" to have experienced the loss of friends and family, she continues; death is part of life. "How old are you?" she asks, "and have you never lost anyone?"
  The first kernel grew into the opening story, set in Zweibrücken, where a former lover of Alice's is slowly dying out of reach of his wife, leaving Alice to to look after his child. The toddler has begun to cry unconsolably on the road to visit her father. Hermann says she wanted to explore the "atmosphere" of Alice living for a few days with her former lover's family, and of the time she spends with the dying man at the hospital.
  "When I finished this story I was a little bit scared," she continues. If she wanted to put it together with others it wouldn't be "possible to write other stories about travelling or about a couple." Her response was to construct the book "like variations on a theme, like a corona around this point".
  Three more stories followed, with Alice living through the contrasting loss of two friends and trying to make sense of a death from long ago, but then Hermann says she felt there was one story missing.
  "I needed a bit of a long time to find out that in the last story it's Alice herself," she continues. She decided that Alice had to lose her partner Raymond – a character who had already appeared in a supporting role. "It was a little bit weird, because he was already there. I did feel like someone announcing a death."
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  She's slipping in and out of German, apologising for her imperfect mastery of a language learned only at school and then practised during a year spent working for a German newspaper in New York before returning to Berlin. She traces the roots of her writing to the letters she sent back home from New York.
  Her instinctive way of working, which she describes as like knowing "the room of the story" and finding "the right moment to get into this room, but with my eyes closed", leaves little space for reflection on where her stories come from, or where she might be heading next.
  "I think as little as possible about what I'm writing, what I want to write," she says. She rejects the idea that it's a question of romantic inspiration, she "just starts. But I get one go at it. Just one. I have to get it right first time."
  So it's "an accident" that the characters who die are all men, she says, "I didn't mean it. At the end I saw that it's just men who are dying and I thought maybe I should write another story with a dying woman" but it was already finished.
  The doctors who shrug their shoulders, or say the dying man will be home soon, or make a patient's last words incomprehensible because of the risk of choking on false teeth are not there to criticise the medical profession; it's "just the way it is. There comes the point when you can't do anything, it's just over. Doctors can't make you immortal."
  She nods politely at the suggestion that the short story came naturally to her as a form and shakes her head at the idea that the linked stories of Alice are an indication that a novel might be next.
  "We have a phrase in Germany that it's not the writer who decides how long the text has to be, it's the text that decides," she says. "Sometimes it's like the story finishes itself, it finds its own end." When it happens like that "it's very special, a little bit magical. Then it's right."
  The end comes for the third story with Alice still waiting to hear that a friend has died. Looking for the phone so that it'll be right next to her if it rings, she finds a book of science fiction left open by her partner and begins to read.
  Hermann says she has "great difficulty with the fact that things pass by". For her, writing is a way "to put something in the way of time … to pick a little moment up from the river of time".
  She pauses, looks around at the hustle and bustle of life in the lobby and continues to add in German that "in a wider sense" writing – all writing – is a way of fending off death.

• From Publisher -

  Judith Hermann lives in Berlin, where she works as a freelance writer. Summerhouse, Later is her first book.

• Granta - https://granta.com/contributor/judith-hermann/

  Judith Hermann was born in 1970 in Berlin where she lives and works as a writer and film-maker. ‘This Side of the Oder’, which appeared in Granta 74, was taken from her first collection of short stories, The Summerhouse, Later. She has since written two collections of stories, Nothing But Ghosts (2003) and Alice (2009).

QUOTED: "This is a still more impressive book. It is distinctively new in form and manner, and yet distinctively German in the best, most romantically thoughtful way. Though her settings are ... distinctively, of the loneliness of post-wall Berlin, her spirit is solidly within the highest German traditions. It is not every novelist who could make something redemptive and humane out of five barely connected deathbed scenes. This is a triumph of the novelist's art."

Review: FICTION: Dead reckoning: Philip Hensher on a triumph of the novelist's art: Alice by Judith Hermann, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo 160pp, Clerkenwell Press, pounds 8.99

(Aug. 20, 2011): Arts and Entertainment: p12.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Byline: Philip Hensher
The sites of Judith Hermann's inquisition into loss are temporary ones: a pair of out-of-season holiday lets in Zweibrucken; a lent estate house in Tuscany; a quiet hotel in Berlin. The stuff of the world is intensely observed, but only possessed for the time being, with the exchange of money for days, and rooms. Only towards the end does a more permanent home for grief emerge, with the sense that our social bonds are as easily shed, and entered into, as the walls about us.
Over the last 40 years, novelists have begun to explore ways in which the old formal bonds may be shed, too. The old formal constraints, in which all the characters somehow know each other and in which their motives lead to some kind of mutual solution have started to seem unnecessary. After VS Naipaul's magisterial In a Free State (1971), all sorts of parallel narratives, thematically collected stories, "linked collections" of short stories and other still more unexpected intermediate forms have emerged.
Judith Hermann's Alice uses a particular situation as a linking device. Her central character, Alice, is only very lightly delineated, and is treated rather as an opportunity to observe a sequence of five bereavements and loss. In most of these, Alice's connection to the dying person is left unexplored, or only suggested. She has long ago had a relationship with Misha, dying in Zweibrucken, and is now shepherding his wife and child; she has been invited by Conrad and his wife to holiday in Italy, but she evidently doesn't know them very well, and her chosen guests, Anna and "the Romanian" have never met them when Conrad is taken suddenly ill. Richard is another friend, apparently, in Berlin, whose death is anticipated and indeed planned for in detail.
In these first three episodes, the focus, richly and indeed ecstatically observed, is on the facts of the world. Hermann's style, though highly restrained, is the opposite of affectless; rather, it is all affect, even when the human connections come second to the patient, insect-like observations.
In the last two episodes, Alice's connections to the dead become more solid; first, an inconclusive meeting with the lover of her gay uncle, who committed suicide 40 years ago, before Alice was born. And finally, the aftermath of her husband's sudden death, after which we understand, retrospectively, what the motive for her contemplation of previous intimate encounters with death might have been.
The question of loss and bereavement in a novel is an interesting one; in a sense there is no absence, no negation in literature. A poet who writes of the "huge and birdless silence" instantly evokes a crowd of birds. And Alice's dead husband Raymond exists in two, immense, mirroring versions: one the live one, observed with wonderfully physical, minute particularity as "a mosquito settled on his left shoulder, pushed its proboscis under his skin and pumped with the hind part of its body, calmly and for a long time".
Secondly, after his death, he exists as a collocation of exactly described lingering physical smells, of properties left behind, of memories, of phantom resemblances - and, most painfully, in the sentences that must be spoken to people who don't know of his death. In that second, purely linguistic embodiment of Raymond, there is a kind of novelistic redemption. He is only there in the words: but then, all of them are only there in the words. In choosing loss and absence as the unifying factor to draw a life together, Hermann has chosen well; she has settled on something very near the centre of the novelist's art.
Judith Hermann's reputation in Germany has been high since her impressive debut, the collection of short stories Sommerhaus, Spater. This is a still more impressive book. It is distinctively new in form and manner, and yet distinctively German in the best, most romantically thoughtful way. Though her settings are of rented apartments, hospitals which no longer serve the modern-day needs of the survivors, and, distinctively, of the loneliness of post-wall Berlin, her spirit is solidly within the highest German traditions. It is not every novelist who could make something redemptive and humane out of five barely connected deathbed scenes. This is a triumph of the novelist's art.
Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers is published by Fourth Estate. To order Alice for pounds 7.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
Captions:
Judith Hermann . . . inquisitor of loss
Philip Hensher
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: FICTION: Dead reckoning: Philip Hensher on a triumph of the novelist's art: Alice by Judith Hermann, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo 160pp, Clerkenwell Press, pounds 8.99." Guardian [London, England], 20 Aug. 2011, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A264770555/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b8f12fb3. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A264770555

• Tony's Reading List
  https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2016/11/03/lettipark-by-judith-hermann-review/
  Word count: 1294

  QUOTED: "Where Sommerhaus, später caught the Zeitgeist, Lettipark feels like it’s been left far behind the times."
  "This is more a book to dip into than to read from cover to cover."

  November 3, 2016
  ‘Lettipark’ by Judith Hermann (Review)
  After a rather chilly start to German Literature Month over in Greenland, today we’re heading back to Europe with the bus dropping us off for a brief stop in Berlin. Once again, we’re accompanied by a familiar face, but this time she’s in a hurry – the order of the day is short stories, the shorter the better…
  *****
  Judith Hermann’s previous books have all been discussed here on the blog, so I was very happy to receive a review copy of her latest work, courtesy of S. Fischer Verlag. After venturing into new territory with her first novel, Aller Liebe Anfang (Where Love Begins), the writer has gone back to her old love, short stories, for her new book, Lettipark. It consists of seventeen stories, the majority set in an anonymous German city (presumably her beloved Berlin), and while there are a couple of longer pieces among them, the majority clock in at ten to twelve pages, with a couple even shorter.
  In fact, the first story, ‘Kohlen’ (‘Coal’) runs to less than six pages, barely long enough to get settled into our armchairs. This vignette sees a group of people shifting seven tons of coal for the winter into a shed, an activity interrupted by the appearance of the neighbour’s boy on his bicycle. At this point, the story takes a turn, with the action switching from the coal shed to memories of the boy’s dead mother, a woman those present knew well.
  One of the central themes of Lettipark is catching up with old friends. For example, in ‘Rückkehr’ (‘Return’), a woman is trying to get used to the return of her old friend after his years working in the frozen north. They kept in touch over the years via telephone, but picking up where they left off isn’t easy after all this time. ‘Solaris’ sees two flatmates, Ada and Sophia, reunited decades later when Ada comes to see Sophia perform in a play. The actress’ words seem rather apt:
  Es gibt keine Brücken zwischen Solaris und Erde, flüstert Sophia neben Ada.
  Es kann keine geben.
  ‘Solaris’, p.34 (S. Fischer Verlag, 2016)
  There are no bridges between Solaris and Earth, whispered Sophia next to Ada.
  There can’t be any. *** (my translation)
  No matter how close the connection once was, she seems to be whispering, it’ll never be the same after so many years.
  The effect time can have is shown in several other stories. ‘Zeugen’ (‘Witnesses’) shows two couples at dinner, one with a marriage on the rocks. However, much of the story is taken up by an anecdote about a – possibly apocryphal – meeting with Neil Armstrong, an allegory for the distance travelled by the couples (even if theirs is in time rather than in space). This is also true of the title story, where a woman in a supermarket notices a face from the past, evoking memories of a man who was interested in both of them. While this lovelorn Romeo receives much of the attention, it’s the changes time has wrought upon the woman who once spurned him that occupies the narrator.
  Throughout Hermann’s work, from her debut to this collection, I’ve felt a sense of time progressing in her books at the same rate as in the outside world. The bright twenty-something party people of Sommerhaus, Später (Summerhouse, Later) turned into the slightly more jaded adults of Nichts als Gespenster (Nothing but Ghosts) a few years later. Now in their forties, the reality of life has well and truly kicked in for these tired adults, making Lettipark an examination of lives where the gloss has worn off.
  A good example of this is ‘Papierflieger’ (‘Paper Planes’), in which a single mother calls on an old friend to babysit while she goes to a job interview. We gradually learn of issues in her past, watching as she looks for a new start:
  Sie sagt, manchmal möchte ich alles noch mal zerlegen, neu zusammensetzen. Nicht noch mal von vorne anfangen, das meine ich nicht. Aber mit dem, was da ist, was anderes machen? Naja, und das geht eben nicht. Sieh dir Sammi und Luke an. Ich glaube, ich kann nicht mehr zurück.
  ‘Papierflieger’, p.72
  She says, sometimes I’d like to cut everything up and put it back together again differently. Not start from scratch again, that’s not what I mean. Do something different with what’s already there? Yeah, but that just isn’t possible. Look at Sammi and Luke. I don’t think I can go back any more. ***
  Life has ground her down to the extent that she doubts whether she has the energy to start afresh. At her age, she seems to say, it’s more than anyone can expect.
  There are several interesting stories in Lettipark, yet in truth I’d have to say that many are rather slight and unsatisfying, with Hermann’s decision to focus on numerous short pieces backfiring somewhat. I tried to read the book slowly over several days so that the stories didn’t simply blend into one another, but there were far too many which introduce us to a couple of random people, say very little, and then end:
  Markovic hatte den Motor laufen lassen, als würde seine Schwester Bojana eine Bank überfallen. Selma hatte hinten gesessen.
  ‘Pappelpollen’ (‘Poplar Pollen’), p.84
  Markovic had left the engine running, as if his sister Bojana was robbing a bank. Selma was sitting in the back. ***
  You can see what she’s trying to do, building up a picture piece by piece, but it all gets a little repetitive. Sadly, I was rolling my eyes towards the end as I made my way through yet another story about nothing in particular.
  Which is a shame as there are some good pieces here among the weaker efforts. ‘Fetisch’ (‘Fetish’) is an unnerving piece centred on a woman left alone by her boyfriend in a circle of circus caravans. While waiting (and hoping) for his return, she encounters a young boy who shares a secret with her over the small fire she has built to keep her warm, a moment of both calm and foreboding. Another I enjoyed is ‘Manche Erinnerungen’ (‘Some Memories’), at sixteen pages the longest piece in the collection. Here, a young woman sharing a house with her eighty-two-year-old landlady talks about an impending trip to Italy. Surprisingly, this leads the old woman to talk about her own experiences of the region, stirring up unpleasant memories of the past in the process…
  Hermann’s latest work is very much a book about the past, and how you can’t really revisit it; which is ironic, as that’s the advice I’d probably give the author. Where Sommerhaus, später caught the Zeitgeist, Lettipark feels like it’s been left far behind the times, There are stories here I wouldn’t mind taking another look at, but I doubt I’d be tempted to go through the whole collection again. This is more a book to dip into than to read from cover to cover, but (as is often the case) you’ll have to take my word for it – at least, that is, until the English version makes it into print 😉
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• London Independent
  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/judith-hermann-where-love-begins-stalking-with-mr-pfister-book-review-a6911861.html
  Word count: 620

  QUOTED: "Where Love Begins is set down with vivid intensity, in prose that is frequently lyrical and it offers a narrative that often nudges up against the epiphanic. The whole becomes a masterly portrayal of the contrasting evils of obsession and disengagement."

  Judith Hermann, Where Love Begins: 'Stalking with Mr Pfister', book review
  Hermann’s debut novel deals with the sombre subject of stalking, dwelling upon the inner world of the stalker as well as entering the lives of his victims
  Peter Carty
  Sunday 6 March 2016 16:25 GMT
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  Stella leads a quiet life in a German suburb. Her days are framed by generational symmetry; she is raising her daughter Ava, in between working as a carer for the elderly.
  Her husband Jason, meanwhile, is a builder who spends long periods away, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
  Stella is ambivalent about her orderly tranquillity. She tells herself that everything in it is precious, so that even her doubts are there to be savoured.

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  When she has a desire for release – a “wild longing” – it is tempered by a sense of her vulnerability and the fragility of her existence. And, occasionally, she feels apprehensive: “As if a whirlwind were approaching across the meadow, something formless, something big.”
  A neighbour, Mr Pfister, rings on her doorbell and says he wants to talk to her. She rebuffs his overtures, but he returns to ring the bell at irregular intervals.
  Then he starts to leave strange letters and packages for her. Stella is slow to react and she has no idea what to do, but she is certain that she does not want Mr Pfister’s attentions.
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  Hermann’s debut novel deals with the sombre subject of stalking, dwelling upon the inner world of the stalker as well as entering the lives of his victims. She is a notable writer of literary fiction who made her name through short stories.
  Her last collection, Alice, focused on the themes of loss and death with a series of tales which were deftly interlinked, prompting speculation that she would move on to longer fiction. Where Love Begins has duly appeared.
  Where formerly the symmetry of Stella’s life was benign, after Mr Pfister’s intrusion a hostile axis now dominates. Stella is caught between Mr Pfister and Jason: two angry men. Mr Pfister’s obsession with Stella appears to mask an empty existence, threatening in its intimations of serious mental illness.
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  On the domestic front, meanwhile, Jason is nursing his own doubts and regrets. He is psychologically distant during his returns to the family home, finding it hard to talk to Stella even at the dining table. The fissures in their relationship widen.
  Hermann has brought her skills with shorter fiction to bear here. It is sometimes said that a short story has more in common with a poem than a novel. Certainly, Where Love Begins is set down with vivid intensity, in prose that is frequently lyrical and it offers a narrative that often nudges up against the epiphanic.
  The whole becomes a masterly portrayal of the contrasting evils of obsession and disengagement.
  Where Love Begins, by Judith Hermann (Translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo). Clerkenwell Press £10.99

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/19/alice-judith-hermann-review
  Word count: 794

  Alice by Judith Hermann – review
  These five linked episodes add up to a triumph of the novelist's art

  Philip Hensher
  Friday 19 August 2011 22.55 BST
  First published on Friday 19 August 2011 22.55 BST

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  T
  he sites of Judith Hermann's inquisition into loss are temporary ones: a pair of out-of-season holiday lets in Zweibrücken; a lent estate house in Tuscany; a quiet hotel in Berlin. The stuff of the world is intensely observed, but only possessed for the time being, with the exchange of money for days, and rooms. Only towards the end does a more permanent home for grief emerge, with the sense that our social bonds are as easily shed, and entered into, as the walls about us.
  Over the last 40 years, novelists have begun to explore ways in which the old formal bonds may be shed, too. The old formal constraints, in which all the characters somehow know each other and in which their motives lead to some kind of mutual solution have started to seem unnecessary. After VS Naipaul's magisterial In a Free State (1971), all sorts of parallel narratives, thematically collected stories, "linked collections" of short stories and other still more unexpected intermediate forms have emerged.

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  Judith Hermann's Alice uses a particular situation as a linking device. Her central character, Alice, is only very lightly delineated, and is treated rather as an opportunity to observe a sequence of five bereavements and loss. In most of these, Alice's connection to the dying person is left unexplored, or only suggested. She has long ago had a relationship with Misha, dying in Zweibrücken, and is now shepherding his wife and child; she has been invited by Conrad and his wife to holiday in Italy, but she evidently doesn't know them very well, and her chosen guests, Anna and "the Romanian" have never met them when Conrad is taken suddenly ill. Richard is another friend, apparently, in Berlin, whose death is anticipated and indeed planned for in detail.
  In these first three episodes, the focus, richly and indeed ecstatically observed, is on the facts of the world. Hermann's style, though highly restrained, is the opposite of affectless; rather, it is all affect, even when the human connections come second to the patient, insect-like observations.
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  In the last two episodes, Alice's connections to the dead become more solid; first, an inconclusive meeting with the lover of her gay uncle, who committed suicide 40 years ago, before Alice was born. And finally, the aftermath of her husband's sudden death, after which we understand, retrospectively, what the motive for her contemplation of previous intimate encounters with death might have been.
  The question of loss and bereavement in a novel is an interesting one; in a sense there is no absence, no negation in literature. A poet who writes of the "huge and birdless silence" instantly evokes a crowd of birds. And Alice's dead husband Raymond exists in two, immense, mirroring versions: one the live one, observed with wonderfully physical, minute particularity as "a mosquito settled on his left shoulder, pushed its proboscis under his skin and pumped with the hind part of its body, calmly and for a long time".
  Secondly, after his death, he exists as a collocation of exactly described lingering physical smells, of properties left behind, of memories, of phantom resemblances – and, most painfully, in the sentences that must be spoken to people who don't know of his death. In that second, purely linguistic embodiment of Raymond, there is a kind of novelistic redemption. He is only there in the words: but then, all of them are only there in the words. In choosing loss and absence as the unifying factor to draw a life together, Hermann has chosen well; she has settled on something very near the centre of the novelist's art.
  Judith Hermann's reputation in Germany has been high since her impressive debut, the collection of short stories Sommerhaus, Später. This is a still more impressive book. It is distinctively new in form and manner, and yet distinctively German in the best, most romantically thoughtful way. Though her settings are of rented apartments, hospitals which no longer serve the modern-day needs of the survivors, and, distinctively, of the loneliness of post-wall Berlin, her spirit is solidly within the highest German traditions. It is not every novelist who could make something redemptive and humane out of five barely connected deathbed scenes. This is a triumph of the novelist's art.
  Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers is published by Fourth Estate.

• Shelf Life
  https://1shelflife.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/book-review-alice-by-judith-hermann/
  Word count: 833

  QUOTED: "It’s very postmodern in style, with very sparse almost bare prose, and with this direct style of writing, there is no explanation of how Alice may know the people we encounter in these stories. Some small inferences may be made, but much is left to the reader to fill in for themselves. This can be a little disorientating."

  Book Review: Alice by Judith Hermann
  Posted by koko in Literary Fiction, Prize Winners and tagged with alice, book review, books, death, Fiction, judith hermann, literature, photography, reading, relationships
  October 2, 2012
  After reading and enjoying Other Lives But Mine a month or so ago, I thought I’d give literature in translation another go. This time I thought I’d venture to Germany and picked up a book called Alice by a widely read writer called Judith Hermann. I’d be lying if I said the breathtaking cover didn’t play a large part in my decision. I honestly cannot get over this cover, so damned beautiful!
  So maybe all European writers have a particular interest in mortality, because funnily enough, this book is ALSO a contemplation on death. It tells of waiting for death to come, of when it occurs suddenly and unexpectedly, of the silence that comes from the questions left unanswered for decades when a person takes their own life, and primarily of what is left behind after death.

  The novella is made up of five different interconnected narratives, five separate stories brought together by Alice, the central character whose life is punctuated with instances of death. Each section is named after the person who is either dead or dying in the story. It’s very postmodern in style, with very sparse almost bare prose, and with this direct style of writing, there is no explanation of how Alice may know the people we encounter in these stories. Some small inferences may be made, but much is left to the reader to fill in for themselves. This can be a little disorientating, which is how I feel you’re meant to feel when reading postmodern literature.
  This book is about death, yet in a way it skirts around the actual occurrence itself, instead detailing the mundane, the specifics of everyday life, never attempting to describe emotion or anything much beyond facts. In its listing of banalities it somehow normalises death, makes death a part of everyday life, something that happens between swimming in a lake and buying ice cream from a petrol station (which I suppose it is).
  An example of this is in the story, ‘Malte’. Alice arranges to meet up with someone from her late uncle Malte’s past; her uncle who killed himself before Alice was even born. The account of this meeting is meticulously detailed in its awkwardness, yet we learn nothing more about the reasons for her uncle’s suicide. However, there are minute snippets of information that can lead you to your own conclusions as to what may have happened all those years ago. And so this is how Judith Hermann speaks – without words.
  There was a part of the final story that really did resonate with me, however. Alice is sorting through the things of someone who was central to her life when in a jacket pocket she comes across a crumpled bakery bag with a half-eaten almond horn in it. Such a small, trivial thing all of a sudden becomes significant. Little pockets of someone’s life left behind in their literal pockets, evidence that this person was once a living breathing human being. They once went to bakeries and ate almond horns. They are now reduced to things and memories and anecdotes. If you’ve ever lost someone close to you, this will make a lot of sense.

  After reading the book, despite the entire thing being from her point of view, you don’t feel like you know Alice at all. You only have a vague outline of the person she may be, but even that is a stretch. I appreciate that this is indeed intentional and the point of the whole postmodern thing, but I found it be unsettling. It was perhaps a little too reserved and devoid of feeling for me, though I appreciate that this is in fact what many will love about it.
  I’m sure many critics would say that her complete detachment and almost matter of fact way of describing events is what makes this novel such a great accomplishment, for the power of the narrative lies in what is left unsaid. An essay I could have written for a class in university would have probably said something along those lines too, but now, reading without a motive makes me question whether we can rate a writer for what they do not write, for the gaps they leave in their narrative for their readers to fill in? Can we?

• Bookmunch
  https://bookmunch.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/one-hundred-percent-scary-where-love-begins-by-judith-hermann/
  Word count: 731

  QUOTED: "Don’t be fooled by this book’s ostensible simplicity: it might be easy to skip through very fast, but it’s one hundred percent scary."

  March 16, 2016
  bookmunch

  “One hundred percent scary” – Where Love Begins by Judith Hermann
  Hermann’s relative lack of acclaim in the Anglophone literary world is one of many depressing examples of the under-appreciation of translated fiction around these parts: while her books are available here in the UK, and while, when noticed, they’re highly praised, they’re not exactly noticed very much, which is ridiculous, given both the quality of the work itself and the buzz she generates back home in Berlin. (But then, hey, she’s a woman writing about Serious Things, and she’s into short fiction – both terrible career moves, PR-wise, in the good old world of British supermarket book charts.) Her 2009 book, Alice, was a collection of stories about death, linked by the presence in each of the eponymous protagonist; both beautifully composed and thematically uncompromising, it’s a great introduction to Hermann’s prose style, and a handy primer for the kind of deceptively simple writing and disturbing subject matter you’ll find in her latest novel, Where Love Begins.
  Here we’ve got Stella, a private nurse, who’s got a husband, Jason, who works away from home as a builder, and a daughter, Ava, who’s at kindergarten. Stella lives in a housing development, doesn’t particularly know her neighbours, spends her spare time phoning or writing to her old friend, Clara, who’s similarly married in a far-away part of the country. Her life is pretty circumscribed by the limits of her house, the cycle to work, Ava’s routine, and Jason’s back-and-forth schedule; she’s thinking about quitting her job, about trying something else, but she’s not doing too badly for now and the rhythm of the days is carrying her onwards. And then she meets Mister Pfister – or, rather, he meets her. Mister Pfister is a neighbour, but not one Stella’s ever registered before: one day, he rings her doorbell and asks if they can have ‘a conversation’. Stella, who doesn’t know him, and who’s a little freaked out to be abruptly confronted like this in her own home, refuses. And it escalates from there: he keeps ringing, he leaves letters and messages in her box, he turns up at her workplace – all, of course, when Jason’s absent. So what do you do in these circumstances? Is it harassment, or are you over-reacting? Are you being hostile and unnecessarily defensive, or are you protecting your home and your privacy? Do you confront him or ignore him? Where does the line fall between obsession and burgeoning love?
  Intense, right? Hermann’s prose, though, is very, very simple: the book’s one of those easy reads that lulls you even as it draws you into deeply creepy territory – just as, in fact, Mister Pfister’s quiet insistent and diffident manner makes Stella, and the reader, question her own reactions. It’s written in the present tense, too – another seductive technique, one that reveals nothing of what’s to come, which, again, cranks up the tension so that by the end of what’s really not a very long book at all, you’ll feel as strung out as Stella herself. Here, then, we’ve got a novel in which very little actually happens – some doorbell action, some unwanted mail, various trips to see Stella’s patients, a few inconclusive exchanges with friends/colleagues/acquaintances, and minimal interaction between the protagonist and antagonist – and in which, yet, we’re made, almost unwittingly, to confront a whole bunch of thought-provoking ideas about intimacy, boundaries, vulnerability, and (maybe most interesting) the ways in which our physical environments (Stella’s innocuous housing development) affect the ways in which we interact, or otherwise, with the world.
  Any Cop?: Don’t be fooled by this book’s ostensible simplicity: it might be easy to skip through very fast, but it’s one hundred percent scary. We loved it, but if, say, you’ve got a pal who’s about to move to a semi-countryside estate, perhaps in Germany, we’re not sure this’d be a very appropriate house-warming gift…

  Valerie O’Riordan

• Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/where-love-begins-by-judith-hermann-review-mundane-tale-of-a-modern-life-1.2569620
  Word count: 1388

  QUOTED: "The narrative progresses into a bland void. There is no real menace, only the banal persistence of a stranger determined to engage. Where Love Begins is slow-moving and humdrum. Instead of mounting terror, there is only an irritating relentlessness and Hermann ponders about where to take the story."
  "Hermann makes several thrusts at injecting some atmosphere, yet even a half- hearted display of violence does nothing to dispel the aura of polemical sleepwalking. If Where Love Begins is a metaphor for social isolation it is vague, directionless and lacking any conviction."

  Where Love Begins, by Judith Hermann review: mundane tale of a modern life
  German novel of social isolation is dull, vague and directionless, Eileen Battersby finds

  Eileen Battersby
  Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 01:01

  First published:
  Sat, Mar 12, 2016, 01:01

  Buy Now

  Book Title:
  Where Love Begins
  ISBN-13:
  978-1781254707
  Author:
  Judith Hermann, translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo
  Publisher:
  Clerkenwell Press
  Guideline Price:
  £10.99
  Stella’s days have acquired a pattern: preparing her daughter, Ava, for kindergarten then mechanically attending to as many chores as possible before setting off for her part-time job as a home carer for elderly and infirm patients.
  Stella’s days are monotonous. It is as if she has a small role, moving around on the little stage which her home has become. Entire glimpses of her life may be viewed though windows. She cleans and folds many items of clothing, mostly her daughter’s, washes plates and then gets ready for the next act. Preparing little meals for her patients is similar to what she does for her child. Only, with the child, Stella is in complete control, just about.
  At the kindergarten, she is grateful for the days when Ava isn’t the last child to be picked up. On one such evening: “There are six or seven other kids there; their jackets still hanging on the clothes’ hooks; little pictures of tractors, flowers and butterflies are pasted next to the hooks. A snail is pasted next to Ava’s hook, which she has been and continues to be distressed about since her first day in kindergarten.”
  Stella suspects her child is a loner; it is a strange observation – after all, she is only four “going on five”. She also thinks Ava may be as impatient as she, Stella, is.
  But then, Stella is uneasy. She has already had to deal with the teachers asking her if she “reaffirms Ava sufficiently”. An odd inquiry – and an intrusive one. It upset Stella, who “had a hard time understanding the question”. Stella fears she reaffirms her too much. It seems she gets attacked on all sides, including by her patients, particularly grumpy Esther, who orders her to stop frowning: “You’ll look like an angry parrot when you get old.”
  It takes very little to detect the numbing misery of Stella’s life in a modern, not-yet- complete housing estate, where none of the neighbours are sufficiently interested to speak to each other. Berliner Judith Hermann has demonstrated her grasp of modern isolation since the publication of her first collection, Sommerhaus, Später, in 1998. Those nine stories, which appeared in English within three years, explored a generation coming of age in and around Berlin.
  Unlike her great, near-contemporary Jenny Erpenbeck, who makes inspired use of the past, Hermann is rooted in a taut, rather bloodless present. Her characters are trapped in freefall, described with precise prose, conveying detail if little emotion, probably because emotion is confined to a mounting hysteria for which there are no words.
  Where Love Begins is a flatly written, chilling study of how life can become confined within a framework that is both protective and restricted. The narrative has a stilted, improvisational quality. Stella is barely alive. After leaving her daughter to playschool, she cycles home, “unlocks the front door, enters the hall and feels distinctly grateful, as if everything around her were temporary, as if there were no certainty of permanence”.
  Stella is married to Jason, the quiet man into whose hand she once placed her own when she found herself seated next to him on a small plane. Returning from the wedding of her friend Clara, she confessed her fear of flying to Jason and asked if she could sit beside him. Aside from holding her hand, Jason simply fell asleep. Stella asked if they would see each other again. It took Jason three weeks, but he did phone her.
  That three-week delay acquires prophetic resonance. Jason works away from home, and he and Stella appear to share a remote relationship.
  Likewise, everything about this novel is conducted at a remove. Hermann has separated Stella from Clara, “her best and only friend”, by a distance of 1,000km: “she has two children now and is just as addicted to being alone as Stella. That’s because of the children, Clara says. They devour you. Stella thinks of that in the mornings when she sits at the kitchen table with Ava, drinking tea with honey and watching her eat a banana.” Stella recalls telling Ava that “Clara says you devour us. Is that true, Ava?” Not quite what one might put to a child “going on five”.
  Somehow Stella gets through the days, thanks to unusual support from Paloma who runs the office at the community centre. The use of the word “community” may be intended as ironic as there is no humour in the book and no sign of community either. Paloma is the most interesting character. She is 50, “tall and gaunt; her expression is disdainful and at the same time melancholy . . . she babysits for Ava; she’s curious but not too curious . . . Paloma has a penchant for Swedish crime novels. She almost always wears black dresses . . . she looks like an actress in a silent film . . .” Wilfully vague It is curious. Hermann has placed a number of noncommittal characters hovering around her dull central character. Stella apparently was wilder in her previous life. But none of this really adds much to a story which is deliberately, wilfully vague. Jason returns home for brief stays. The only development of much interest is the arrival of a man who rings at Stella’s door and speaks to her though the intercom. He is intent on a conversation. These visitations inflicted by Mister – not Herr – Pfister settle into a routine: “The ringing of someone who just wants to say, Here I am, I’m here, standing outside your door.”
  The narrative progresses into a bland void. There is no real menace, only the banal persistence of a stranger determined to engage. Where Love Begins is slow-moving and humdrum. Instead of mounting terror, there is only an irritating relentlessness and Hermann ponders about where to take the story. Even the possibility that the intruder may be a rejected or traumatised suitor simply evaporates. Stella decides to return the favour and sets out to his door. His mailbox is old and dirty: “ . . . the mailbox is brimful. Advertisements, direct mail, window envelopes. Stella takes out a letter, an official letter from a bank, and stuffs it back into the mailbox . . .” She imagines what the side of his house is like: “a bizarre, glowing, toxic wave of chaos” sloshing “over the doorsill out into the garden, flowing towards Stella, and Stella lets the cover of the mailbox drop and backs away.”
  Eventually she spots her stalker in the local supermarket but he is only interested in her when she is at home, or rather, his abiding fascination may be with her house. The one-dimensional stalker lives to a set of rules. Hermann makes several thrusts at injecting some atmosphere, yet even a half- hearted display of violence does nothing to dispel the aura of polemical sleepwalking. If Where Love Begins is a metaphor for social isolation it is vague, directionless and lacking any conviction. As if as an after thought, a closing paragraph attempts to put Stella’s crisis in perspective, but it is far too hasty and random to salvage a mundane story that never really goes anywhere nor takes even a minor risk in the process. Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent