Contemporary Authors

• Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2015
• Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For Flatiron Books (New York, NY), 2017

1. Schadenfreude, a love story : me, the Germans, and 20 years of attempted transformations, unfortunate miscommunications, and humiliating situations that only they have words for LCCN 2016038531 Type of material Book Personal name Schuman, Rebecca, author. Main title Schadenfreude, a love story : me, the Germans, and 20 years of attempted transformations, unfortunate miscommunications, and humiliating situations that only they have words for / Rebecca Schuman. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Flatiron Books, 2017. Description 274 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781250077578 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PN4874.S345 A3 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Kafka and Wittgenstein : the case for an analytic modernism LCCN 2015029414 Type of material Book Personal name Schuman, Rebecca, author. Main title Kafka and Wittgenstein : the case for an analytic modernism / Rebecca Schuman. Published/Produced Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2015. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9780810131460 (cloth : alk. paper) 9780810131842 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PT2621.A26 Z8651716 2015 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Pan Kisses Kafka - https://pankisseskafka.com/about/

  My name is Rebecca Schuman. I live in St. Louis, Missouri with my husband and our hilarious daughter.

  I am a columnist for Slate and the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Vitae hub, and author of the academic book Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism and the regular book Schadenfreude, A Love Story, out February 7, 2017.

• Nihilism For Optimists - http://nihilismforoptimists.com/#schadenfreude

  Rebecca Schuman was born in Deep Springs, California and grew up in Eugene, Oregon. She graduated from Vassar College, and spent several years working in media and publishing in New York City before beginning her PhD in German at the University of California-Irvine, which she received in 2010. She taught at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Ohio State before leaving academia in 2013 to become a freelance writer. She writes the "Deutschland Über Us" column for THE AWL, and is a frequent contributor to SLATE, the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, the ATLANTIC and other publications. She is also the author of several scholarly articles and KAFKA AND WITTGENSTEIN, an academic book based on her doctoral dissertation. SCHADENFREUDE is her first work of commercial nonfiction.

  Rebecca lives in St. Louis with her husband and young daughter.

• Chronicle Vitae - https://chroniclevitae.com/people/111-rebecca-schuman/profile

  I am a columnist for Vitae, here to treat the academic job market with the gravitas, authority and sobriety it deserves--by which I mean: none. My recurring column, Market Crash Course, provides a dose of real talk and gallows humor during the academic hiring cycle, a time where self-censorship, anxiety, and all-pervasive feelings of worthlessness can make even the most stable of us into unrecognizable monsters, just like the one I described in "My Academic Metamorphosis," or emotional trainwrecks, like I was in "Thesis Hatement." Although I adjunct five courses per year at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, I consider myself a "post-academic" hellraiser, truth-teller, and all-purpose blabbermouth.

• The Professor is In - https://theprofessorisin.com/2017/02/06/schadenfreuderebeccaschuman/

  Schadenfreude: An Interview with Rebecca Schuman
  Posted on February 6, 2017 by Karen
  I’m delighted to feature an interview today with Rebecca Schuman, about her new memoir, Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For.

  It comes out… TOMORROW! (Tuesday, Feb 7)

  We all need a break from the endless misery of life in America just now–let Rebecca’s hilarious, smart, insightful new book be yours!

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  KK: Tell me about your journey from academic job seeker to author of Schadenfreude, A Love Story, your much-anticipated memoir.

  RS: Sorry, I’m too busy laughing ruefully at “much-anticipated.” I hope that some people buy and read and enjoy this book, but I don’t have any delusions of authorial grandeur. I’m glad to hear that you anticipate it, though. That’s really all I need. The Kelsky demographic! Here’s my journey: After I crashed and burned in academia and Slate published “Thesis Hatement,” in 2013, several literary agents contacted me. I ended up going with the wonderful Alia Habib (also your agent!), and it was the best decision of my life. But it took almost two years to go from agent-with-interest to book deal in hand. Two years and—I’ve never talked about this publicly before—four different proposals, most of which didn’t make it out of Alia’s email inbox, because they were embarrassing. Once I eventually managed to eke out the Schadenfreude proposal in my ever-decreasing spare time, several houses were interested in earnest, almost immediately.

  (Alia kept telling me she was sorry it was taking “so long,” by which she meant a week. A week! Can you academics imagine?)

  My current editor at Flatiron bought the project on proposal in what the publishing industry calls a “pre-empt,” which is an offer that pre-empts an auction. When I called my family to tell them it happened, they were like, What book? I hadn’t told anyone I even had a proposal out with publishers.

  Speaking of “Thesis Hatement,” that was, obviously, the piece that brought your journey out of academia to my attention. I was a fan of it, but many academics (and non-academics) weren’t. If you could write “Thesis Hatement” again now, what would you do differently?

  I would have made it much more about adjuncting and less about my anger (or, at any rate, I would have channeled my anger to talk about adjuncting more, and better). I also wouldn’t have used the word “bat-shit” to describe my own research, which was my attempt to be modest but to this day brands me as an anti-intellectual who Doesn’t Believe In Her Ideas. Otherwise, no regrets.

  In academic publication, the toughest part (aside from meeting deadlines) is probably contending with peer review. Is there a similar gatekeeping process in commercial publishing? In what ways did you have to compromise your vision to get this book into existence?

  I had to compromise everything, all the time. Commercial publishing is not for the Ayn Rand set. (In fact, even Ayn Rand compromised in the publication of Atlas Shrugged. She refused to let them cut some long-winded speech and paid for the extra printing costs herself. But I digress. I loathe Ayn Rand, but I somehow know a lot about her. [KK: weirdly, so do I. I even wrote about her for a Rhodes Scholarship application as an 18 year old college student!])

  Anyway, this is a stone-cold fact: if you want to succeed in commercial publication, you have to be willing to do everything your agent says, and then you have to be willing to do almost everything your editor says (which may contradict your agent). I abide by the 90/10 rule. I cave to 90 percent of what they want, and then fight for the 10 percent that really matters to me. If you go in to a commercial project insisting on fighting for 100 percent of your darlings, you’ll never sell a thing, and be miserable the whole time.

  You have been vocal about regretting your PhD in German—but without it, you would have neither the experience nor the literary knowledge to have written this book, which you have called, pithily (just now in an email), “a German literary and philosophical primer disguised as a tawdry sex memoir full of cigarettes and bad decisions.” Was your PhD actually instrumental to your journey?

  Yes. I’ll readily admit it. I give. In the end, I can’t really be too angry about how things turned out. I wouldn’t recommend my own trajectory for anyone else, but I did, indeed, land on my feet, and I do, indeed, appreciate all of the knowledge and skills the doctorate forced me to gain. Don’t tell anyone, though. (Whoops, too late.)

  When I was working with Alia to sell my book, we had a cringingly bad meeting with an editor from a famous university (*cough* Chicago *cough*) press, which contrasted painfully with the highly efficient and professional meetings we had with editors from commercial presses. If there was ever anything that drove home that final nail in the coffin of academia for me, it was that meeting with that smugly clueless (or was it cluelessly smug) editor, who was living in this weird fantasy of elite status that was totally divorced from his and his press’s actual position vis-a-vis me and my book manuscript! To spell it out, he thought he was dealing with a desperate and almost totally powerless academic… and not somebody with a large platform, a highly-marketable (in certain circles) manuscript, and plenty of competing options. I’d never really seen the tattered elitism of academic so painfully displayed. Hey, look what I just did, I used a “question” as an opportunity to make a long-winded speech about my own experience. You can take the person out of academia but…

  So typical! They must have been gobsmacked at your reaction. “Wait, you’re NOT bowing and scraping for poorly-paid or completely unpaid PUBLICATION? BEGONE, PLEB!” Ha.

  Did you have any surprising or weird experiences in the commercial publication process—from fomenting idea to finished book on the shelf—that you’ve never told anyone, that you want academics to know about?

  Here’s an embarrassing story, and it also has to do with unfortunate intersections of academic and commercial publication. I’ve never told it in public before. My first idea for a crossover book was a non-academic introduction to German literature and philosophy. It was 2013 and I had a chip on my shoulder about proving I was smart. I wrote three painstaking chapters of this project on spec. I was just barely out of academia, so to me these chapters were so accessible, so edgy, and would so scandalize my academic peers because of their regular-person prose and openly anti-academic bent. Well, the commercial publishers passed. To the one they found it “way too academic.” The closest I got was the trade imprint of a well-known academic house—but, much to my horror and surprise, they submitted it to peer review. This was when I was at peak infamy with academics and academia, just spewing bile from every rooftop, so you can imagine the peer review was scathing. The funniest part was that the publisher didn’t care. They still wanted to buy it—it just fell through at acquisitions for budget reasons. But in the end I’m glad that project fizzled. Schadenfreude still snuck a lot of that literature and philosophy in, but it’s woven into (what I hope is) a rollicking narrative.

  Your critics often complain that you are too self-absorbed, and that your critiques of academia would have been more powerful if they’d not focused so much on your personal story. What does a memoir—the most navel-gazing of all genres—possibly have to offer these readers (or hate-readers)?

  This is an interesting dilemma, because even in answering this question I sound self-absorbed, especially now, under the constant noxious cloud of our new authoritarian regime. Let me digress for a second and say that of course it is unbelievably awkward to be promoting a memoir at this historical juncture. But I believe writing of this kind is still essential. My thinking is: Donald Fucking Trump is ruining the world at precipitous speed, but one thing we can use to fight him is our freedom of artistic expression. Everyone should go out and buy (or check out!) my book and ALL the books, especially by authors of color, women, LGBT authors, Muslim authors, immigrant authors—any voice that Donald Fucking Trump wants to marginalize and silence, we should amplify. Do I hope everyone will consider my voice among this chorus? Yes!

  OK, digression over. I write memoir because that’s the genre I most like to read. I am always honored when honest people are willing to reveal their vulnerabilities and to let readers, strangers, into their lives. I don’t find it exhibitionistic. I find it brave and exhilarating (when other people do it). I admire this kind of writing in other people, so it’s only natural that I would attempt it myself. Often I relate to writers’ personal struggles and triumphs, but just as often I don’t, and I still love their stories. I read a memoir or book of personal essays a week, almost always by women: Shonda Rimes, Meghan Daum, Roxane Gay, Lindy West, Jessica Valenti, Felicia Day, Sarah Hepola. Love them all. I fully understand if memoir isn’t someone’s bag, but for many of us, using our personal stories lends an urgency and immediacy—and, yes, bravery—to our opinions. The other reason I write about myself is that I have a really scathing sense of humor, and it’s nasty to use it on other people.

  Besides writing and marketing this book, what are you doing with yourself?

  Still writing—for Slate, the Chronicle, the Atlantic, The Hairpin, and more. I’m spending a lot of 2017 doing research and translation for the Jewish Museum of Switzerland. But primarily, I am a full-time parent to a spirited and sensitive kid who just turned two, and I’m not ashamed to say I’m hanging on by my fingernails most of the time. I have limited child care, and I have to be laser-focused during the few hours a week I do get to work. The fact that I wrote this book with a newborn on my chest, and revised it with a crawling dervish who wouldn’t sleep, and did an intense round of edits (basically rewrote the whole thing in nine weeks) while my kid was teething molars in agony—you know what? That was fucking heroic. All parents who somehow eke out any work outside of their caregiving are heroes. I salute you all. And I salute myself.

  What’s your longer term life plan going forward?

  Survive.

  Any last advice for the Ph.D. crowd?

  Funnily enough, also “survive.”

  Thanks for interviewing me, Karen. It’s always a pleasure. [KK: the pleasure is mine! Best of luck with the book, and I hope you get to do a book tour!]

• THE GRAD CAUCUS CHRONICLE - http://www.graduatestudentcaucus.org/interview-with-rebecca-schuman/interview-with-rebecca-schuman

  THE GRAD CAUCUS CHRONICLE
  Editor-in-Chief Kristal Bivona
  Editorial Board Loic Bourdeau
  Darrah Lustig
  Alexandrine Mailhé
  Ervin Malakaj
  FOR CURRENT ISSUE CLICK HERE
  Interview with Rebecca Schuman
  9/19/2013

  Interview by Darrah Lustig

  Rebecca Schuman is an ardent commentator on the current state of the humanities. Schuman earned her PhD in German at the University of California, Irvine in 2010 after which she held a post as a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Ohio State University under the auspices of the ACLS New Faculty Fellow program. Following a series of realizations about the nature of academics in the humanities, Schuman composed a series of articles about her personal experience. Most influential in this regard was her piece in Slate entitled, "Thesis Hatement," which incited a flurry of responses. These articles, along with subsequent blog entries expose the hardships and inconvenient truths about everyday life in academia. The Graduate Caucus Chronicle interviewed Schuman in order to find out more about her own personal experience as a graduate student, her perspectives on and reasons for pursuing an of alt-ac career path, and the changes that she would like to see take shape within the academy in order to prepare graduate students for the harsh realities of life in academia.

  Grad Caucus Chronicle (GCC): Your Slate article, “Thesis Hatement,” generated a slew of reactions. Many blatantly dismissed your article as whiny; some aggressively attacked it (and you for taking such a stance), while yet others (in great numbers) showed support. How do you explain such a varied response to what seemed to be a personal essay? What suggestions can you provide to graduate students in the modern
  languages, who invariably found themselves in one of these camps, and who found themselves lacking the tools necessary to evaluate complex discussions like the one generated by your work that directly relate to their future?

  Rebecca Schuman (RS): I think readers who saw “Thesis Hatement” as whiny just didn’t go for my attempt at gallows humor. I completely understand—I annoy myself on most days, too.

  The aggressive attacks have come largely from three groups of people: entrenched academics who believe that their careers are purely the result of a functioning meritocracy; recent hirees with survivor’s guilt and huge amounts of fear about tenure; and, finally, graduate students who do not want to hear it.

  I am guessing that grad students’ anger derives primarily out of fear of the unknown—there’s no way to know how the job market will affect you. But I think it’s a natural mechanism to attempt to banish negative energy about it, to just radiate job-market positivity and institutional fealty—and when someone like me gets in your face with things you don’t want to acknowledge, the natural reaction is to push back.

  I do think every assault on “Thesis Hatement” had at its root the fear that what I said about the job market was true. People reacted to my critique of a systemic failure with personal attack and it was hurtful, but it makes sense: if you can make it about my weaknesses, then the system is a navigable meritocracy. This is not to say I had perfect credentials! I didn’t—but still, I’m no slouch. But none of my vociferous detractors ever brings up my litany of publications, or the other distinguished stuff on my CV, because that’s counter to the narrative that I failed because I’m a big failing failure. I may be—but that doesn’t change the fact that some of the positions in German this year had 250 applicants. Why are people so scared of just facing that incontrovertible fact? Because it shows how little agency anyone has in amidst such terrifying odds. Any tenured faculty who responds to those odds by saying, “Well, there are always jobs for good people” should be sentenced to ten years as an adjunct.

  This brings me to the reason “Thesis Hatement” resonated positively with so many others. What we all have in common is that we have seen how academic hiring really works—that someone does get what few jobs there are, but that it is impossible to figure out why. Sometimes a position advertised as “beginning” and “20th Century” goes to an 18th Century scholar who’s been on the tenure track four years. Other times, a listing demanding a “proven scholarly agenda” goes to an ABD without a single publication.

  The best way to describe the job market is that it is a Randocracy—that the incalculable, unobtainable quality of “fit” trumps all. That may be a rather Kafkan reading—but if the approach fits, so to speak.

  GCC: Your articles in Slate and The Chronicle of Higher Education suggest that you underwent a series of revelations about the true nature of academia in late stages of graduate studies and during your post-doc phase. What are some of the things you discovered too late that you wish you had been informed about earlier?

  RS: The single thing I wish I’d realized back in graduate school was that faculty stigmatization of non-academic work is a total construct, and a ridiculous one at that. I did not need to socialize myself to such an extent, to believe that I needed to become a replicant of my advisers in order to have any human worth, Total Institution, yada yada. Academic mentors, great though they are at being academics, are just people. I did not—do not—need to become just like them to be worthy of breathing air. I wish it hadn’t taken four years of really intense feelings of failure to realize that.

  GCC: In discussion forums you have been indirectly described as an advocate for inconvenient truths about the current academic system that governs the humanities. What do you see as the big issues that remain unaddressed? What suggestions do you have for graduate students, who see themselves interested in discussing these issues in online forums openly, but shy away in fear of repercussions for their career?

  RS: I think just within the last few weeks, there have been huge strides in addressing what I see as the major problem—departments obscuring, withholding or outright fabricating placement data about their PhDs. This breakthrough is almost singlehandedly due to William Pannapacker’s advocacy in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the resultant PhD Placement Project, which is now ongoing. I made the mistake during grad school of thinking Pannapacker was an antagonist—in reality, he cares more about graduate students’ fates and the future of the academy than anyone else I know.

  I hope that grad students know that I also care deeply about their futures, their well-being—and that is precisely why I am yelling so loudly. I don’t want other people to end up like me—but I don’t mean ‘don’t have my (not actually) shitty credentials’ or ‘don’t be outspoken.’ It has to do with the attitude I had upon graduation that anything outside of permanent employ in the Life of the Mind constitutes worthlessness. Even if you don’t think you’ll feel that way in two, three, four years--don’t underestimate the power of academic socialization.

  As far as expressing opinions but being afraid—I get it, but academe runs on cowardice because we let it. So stop letting it.

  The pushback to me was only because academia has such a culture of chickenshittery. You’re worried about your career, I understand—but how rewarding will that career be, if it’s in an industry that demands nothing less than unconditional servility?

  You have the power to change that culture by using your voice.

  GCC: In your blog you suggest an overhaul of the value and applications of a PhD via top down changes that would create a space for alt-ac career paths. How do you foresee the (non-academic) job market responding to these changes considering that most PhDs are at a considerable disadvantage applying for jobs that they are deemed overqualified for? Are these top down changes you speak of in reality much bigger than academia?

  RS: I can think of several careers off the top of my head for which a PhD is not an overqualification but rather a regular-qualification: grant writer, researcher or research analyst, undergraduate adviser, writing program director/instructor, translator, dissertation consultant (that is a thing!), academic proofreader/editor, certain museum jobs, and of course teacher. I know PhDs or ABDs who do every single one of these things—many of whom reached out to me after “Thesis Hatement” to tell their stories.

  I am, however, not the best resource for this discussion. But I know some people who are: Jennifer Polk at From PhD to Life, and Paula and David (and the incredible community) at Versatile PhD. The idea that humanities PhDs are unfit for any other work, or that the nonacademic job market is unreceptive to PhDs, is largely perpetuated by academics. I haven’t found it to be true at all, and neither have Jen, Paula or David (to name a few).

  GCC: Have you received backlash or evidence that your editorials and blog posts have negatively affected your ability to work and grow in academia, should you decide to return?

  RS: Other than the gleeful predictions from strangers on the Internet, no. Granted, I’m probably blackballed from a few departments—but the joke’s on them, because I never would been hired there anyway, ha! Wait…

  Seriously, though, I am amused at those who have claimed my writing tone is so unprofessional that I would thus be a terrible colleague. Because academe demands only the highest standard of professional decorum—I have known senior professors who left their families to schtupp graduate students, who kept their offices so filthy they belonged on Hoarders, or who maintained offices cushier than most people’s apartments but never showed up to them ever; who expressed open disdain for their students; who couldn’t get along with each other and so their departments went into receivership. I’ve known people to get shunned for having the temerity to get pregnant and bullied out of their jobs for having the tenacity to report sexual harassment. And yet, I publish one 1500-word essay of dark humor and I’m the unprofessional one.

  But even if I did want to return to the hallowed halls, in five years there will be only adjuncts and MOOCs anyway. It will be a brave new world—it already is!—and even the fight I’m fighting now is pretty much obsolete.

  GCC: How do you propose to help current graduate students in the "mid-indoctrination phase" - career counseling? Reduced dissertation requirements? Lower cost of education? Are these changes the responsibility of universities? Of individual language departments? Can you comment on any of these topics extensively?

  RS: Adjunct and MOOCs, man. Soon there won’t be anyone left to do the indoctrinating. Honestly, at this point this is sort of like calling in a nautical engineer to suggest structural improvements to the Titanic when its bow has already plunged into the abyss. But:

  I guess if there is any single thing that can be done, it’s that directors of graduate programs need to get their heads out of their asses and admit what is going on. Admit how terrible the market is.

  Admit that your graduate students will probably not turn into miniature versions of yourself. But this will damage graduate student “morale” (and, more importantly, enrollment in seminars) so I am honestly not sure if it will ever really happen.

  I do think reducing time to degree is a good idea, but not by reducing requirements. I think it can be done by reducing the pressure on a dissertation to be a masterpiece. There’s this onus on dissertations to be perfect, and that’s totally unnecessary. I also think that having successful alt-ac employees come in and talk about their jobs and lives, and holding alt-ac career fairs, are good ideas at the institutional level.

  GCC: Are the challenges that face graduate students of modern languages particularly intense in the realm of German Studies or do all job-seeking graduates across language departments face the same obstacles that you describe?

  RS: In German it’s definitely really bad, because departments are closing and we’re a language that allegedly nobody wants to study anymore (which is not actually true—undergraduates want to go abroad to Germany!), but I can’t say things are cheery in any modern language right now. In Spanish, for example, things are not quite as dire, but ask any Spanish prof if it’s a cakewalk—it isn’t.

  I think the key is to realize that there is a big and interesting world out there, and if you resist the socialization that tells you that it’s a tenure-track job or worthlessness, and keep yourself open to all sorts of possibilities, that things may turn out all right in the end. I mean, I have managed to land on my feet, so really anybody can.

  Rebecca Schuman received the PhD in 2010 from the University of California-Irvine in 2010, and shortly thereafter was appointed to the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University, where she spent two years as part of the ACLS New Faculty Fellows Program. Her monograph, Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism, is under contract with Northwestern University Press. She is now a freelance writer and consultant in St. Louis, MO. Read her blog at http://pankisseskafka.wordpress.com or contact her at rschuman@uci.edu.

  The Grad Caucus Chronicle has disabled comments to encourage our readers to continue the conversation on twitter @gradstudentcaucus, or on our MLA Commons Page, right here.

• Deborah Kalb Books - http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2017/03/q-with-rebecca-schuman.html

  Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb
  Check back often for new Q&As, and for daily historical factoids about books. On Facebook at www.facebook.com/deborahkalbbooks. Follow me on Twitter @deborahkalb.

  Saturday, March 25, 2017
  Q&A with Rebecca Schuman

  Rebecca Schuman is the author of the new book Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For. She also has written Kafka and Wittgenstein: The Case for an Analytic Modernism, and she is a columnist for Slate and The Chronicle of Higher Education's Vitae. She lives in St. Louis.

  Q: Why did Kafka become such a longtime passion for you, and how did it lead you to your fascination with all things German (given that, as you state in your new book, he wasn't German)?

  A: Wow, great question. My relationship with Kafka has changed so much, and my relationship to the German language--and, by extension, culture--is directly traceable back to him.

  My original attraction to Kafka was what, I think, attracts a lot of brainy-but-misunderstood teens: He was SO good at depicting this primal, visceral, almost desperate alienation from everyone around him. He was sort of the first-ever goth kid who nobody understands, you know?

  There's this really short story (one of many he wrote) called "Bachelor's Unhappiness," about coming home to an empty house and having only a forehead to smack with your hand, and that just pierced directly into my soul when I was a teenager, largely ignored by boys (except for one REALLY important one, as the book reveals).

  When you feel like nobody understands you, the best thing in the world is to find someone else to be misunderstood with. For me, that person was Franz Kafka.

  But as I began to study him seriously, I realized that that reading of him was only one of many, and that he actually had profoundly sophisticated, prescient and, honestly, brilliant things to say about the nature of language and communication.

  When I stopped trying to figure out what his stories meant, and concentrated instead on how they did--or didn't!--my relationship with him became much more rewarding (and much less one-sided)! In order to gain the German fluency I needed to read him in the original, though, I had to major in German in college.

  And though I had little patience back then for any non-Kafka-related German thing, as I got older, that language really came in handy when I got interested in Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt and other writers who, what do you know, wrote in German.

  By the time I started my doctorate in German, I began to recognize the luminous genius of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Kleist, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, and the philosophers, too: Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, Wittgenstein--Kafka brought me to all of those people, and for that I will always be grateful.

  Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

  A: The book's primary title, Schadenfreude, A Love Story, signifies the two polar (but ultimately intertwined) directions of the forces governing my relationship with both Germans and myself.

  The Germans enjoyed watching me fail at assimilating into their culture, that's for sure--but there's also this perverse enjoyment I get from watching myself fail that has been hard for me to admit for most of my life. But now that I've published it in a book for God and everyone else to see, I guess that cat's out of that particular bag!

  The extremely EXTREMELY long subtitle (or "reading line," as we call it in the biz) is a result of a two-week collaboration between me and my editor at Flatiron Books, Colin Dickerman.

  We wanted every single word of that subtitle to be perfectly indicative of what was to come in the book--and we also wanted it to be a direct play on one of the jokes I make in a chapter about academia, where I say that every professional academic article has the same title template, which is "MILDLY CLEVER THING: Three-Part List, 'Incomprehensible' Scare Quotes, And At Least One Made-Up Word."

  Since I'm not an academic anymore, I didn't have to make up any words, but I wanted the MILDLY CLEVER THING, colon, Endless List structure to parallel the structure of the life story that lead up to my own struggle with German-adjacent academia.

  Q: How did you decide on the book's organization, and on the different German words you use as chapter titles?

  A: I have always been obsessed with interior symmetry (I think it comes from teaching a lot of Greek tragedy to freshmen when I was a professor), and one thing I always noticed about great literature--which I do NOT create myself, but simply try to acknowledge in my work--is that not a single word is wasted, and everything has a purpose.

  I wanted the titles of my chapters to work like that, or at least to try; so, because the whole book is titled with an untranslatable German word (that I spend about 288 pages working to illustrate), each of the smaller chapters should also be untranslatable words that I work to illustrate, that also themselves work to illustrate the larger untranslatable trajectory of the book.

  Even though the book is a memoir and I technically didn't make it up, I still plotted it (and omitted A LOT of details from my life--future books, I guess), and I plotted it really intricately, like a novel, so that it would have both interior and exterior symmetry.

  (It is far from an afterthought that the book begins with me getting dumped, ends with me getting married, and is called "a love story," for example.)

  Q: In an interview with Slate, you said, "One of the most endearing things about Germans is that they neither understand nor enjoy exaggeration as humor. Given that hyperbole is my primary form of communication, I imagine many Germans will disagree with their culture’s portrayal." Do you have more of a sense now of how German readers have reacted to the book?

  A: So far they've all thought it was really funny. I think I just know a lot of really cool Germans. Several of the Germans who appear in the book have already read it and one said she "peed her pants," but she had literally just given birth when she said that, so I am pretty sure she still had a catheter in and it didn't have much to do with my book. She didn't want to sue me, though!

  Q: What are you working on now?

  A: My column on The Awl, "Deutschland über US," which is a digressive weekly dive into what's happening in Germany, a.k.a. the last bastion of liberal democracy in the world. Some other long-term projects that are top-secret for now, but that I hope to be able to talk about in public soon.

  --Interview with Deborah Kalb

Schuman, Rebecca: SCHADENFREUDE, A LOVE STORY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Schuman, Rebecca SCHADENFREUDE, A LOVE STORY Flatiron Books (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 2, 7 ISBN: 978-1-250-07757-8
The candid adventures of a plucky, German-obsessed American student. Slate columnist Schuman's youth in the 1990s plays out through the nine
chapters of her hilarious memoir, her first book. The author titles each chapter with a relevant German word, reflecting a mood or event in her
self-discovery and her vivid love for German culture, including an enduring, lifelong affinity for Franz Kafka--who, she notes, wasn't German.
During her senior year in high school, this self-proclaimed "nonpracticing half-Jew from Oregon" spent her time poring over SAT practice tests
and nurturing a fawning obsession with Dylan, a handsome, "so brilliant and so pained" geek who found Schuman's brainy awkwardness
intellectually stimulating. But his college dreams and personal goals stagnated any progression in their relationship. The author plodded on at
college as a German major and then fully immersed herself in the culture, grammar, and history of life abroad. A culture clash ensued
immediately as her host family found Schuman's new "postgrunge aesthetic" quite different from her introductory photograph. Surviving on her
own with a newfound independence breathed new life into her travels, and she moved into a loft residence in Berlin as a vegetarian and
"moderate smoker." Highlights include a mishap involving the recovery of her lost passport, pithy social observations, and epiphanies about how
hypocritical Germanic culture can be. "They will think nothing of telling you that you have gained weight," she writes, "but in other situations,
they have ironclad laws of politeness." The author's comparison of Prague's post-Cold War metamorphosis to Gregor Samsa's own transformation
is creatively descriptive, as is her account of her anxiety at being perceived as having Imposter Syndrome while at graduate school in Southern
California. Built on her inner angst and painstaking quest for self-discovery throughout her burgeoning adulthood, Schuman's memoir is a
comedic patchwork of quirky anecdotes written in smooth, sometimes-cocky prose, liberally sprinkled with free-flowing expletives and consistent
sincerity. Schuman's droll, self-deprecating, wild life (so far) will find particular appeal with readers who enjoy memoirs that don't take
themselves too seriously.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Schuman, Rebecca: SCHADENFREUDE, A LOVE STORY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652218&it=r&asid=71ce04732fcf3adbaa4369cb7e52eba8. Accessed 9 July 2017.
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Schadenfreude, a Love Story
Bridget Thoreson
Booklist.
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p11.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
Schadenfreude, a Love Story. By Rebecca Schuman. Feb. 2017.320p. Flatiron, $26.99 (9781250077578).
Blame Kafka. When Schuman falls for a boy with startlingly intense eyes at her high school, her infatuation with him intertwines with their
discussions of the works of the writer from Prague. Her desire to read Kafka in the original German outlives her fleeting young romance and
leads Schuman to major in German, take two trips to live in Germany while attending college, and eventually earn her doctorate in the language.
But she finds that learning German--and getting to know the people who speak it--is no easy task. Schuman recounts her misadventures abroad,
clumsily wielding her slowly growing German vocabulary, with delightfully caustic humor. Brimming with the arrogance of youth, Schuman in
turn horrifies her summer-abroad host family with her slovenly behavior, cultivates a certain nostalgia for Cold War-era East Germany, and
embarks upon an ill-advised romance in Prague. Her most poisoned barbs, however, are reserved for the crushing experience of earning her PhD
and entering a near-hopeless job market. Schuman absolutely revels in the pain caused by her love for the German language.--Bridget Thoreson
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "Schadenfreude, a Love Story." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 11. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474716887&it=r&asid=c9120dc0f1e3ddc5815f041f41001eb8. Accessed 9 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474716887

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Schadenfreude, a Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20
Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate
Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only
They Have Words For
Publishers Weekly.
263.43 (Oct. 24, 2016): p67.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Schadenfreude, a Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating
Situations That Only They Have Words For
Rebecca Schuman. Flatiron, $26.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-07757-8
Schuman structures this disarming memoir around nine German words, including the eponymous schadenfreude (pleasure derived from another's
suffering), inviting the reader to enjoy her travails. She writes with hilarious candor about herself as an entitled teenager, complete with bleached
hair and goth makeup, tormenting a German host family, and later as an assertive, vegetarian, chain-smoking 20-something sharing a loft deep in
postreunification Berlin. Schuman relates her "metamorphosis into monstrous Eurotrash," complete with clashing bright separates accessorized by
multiple scarves, worn year-round, to illustrate Wohngemeinschaft, the German name for an apartment shared with someone who isn't family.
The concepts behind her selected German terms may be universal, but Schuman's application of them is uniquely Teutonic as she weaves
anecdotes with lessons learned to hilarious effect. Schuman's journeys to Germany and her pursuit of further connection with her beloved Franz
Kafka bring to mind another great travel memoirist, Geoff Dyer, writing about D.H. Lawrence. As Dyer does, Schuman entertains while relating
her inner conflicts, personal and cultural hypocrisies, and overblown self-delusions during her decades-long struggle with the German language
and those who speak it. Schuman's engrossing book is a feast of honesty, humility and humor, all the hallmarks of great confessional literature.
(Feb.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Schadenfreude, a Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating
Situations That Only They Have Words For." Publishers Weekly, 24 Oct. 2016, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771842&it=r&asid=825a2a68e007f5d9daa9ef15e7022919. Accessed 9 July
2017.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771842

"Schuman, Rebecca: SCHADENFREUDE, A LOVE STORY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652218&it=r. Accessed 9 July 2017. Thoreson, Bridget. "Schadenfreude, a Love Story." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 11. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474716887&it=r. Accessed 9 July 2017. "Schadenfreude, a Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For." Publishers Weekly, 24 Oct. 2016, p. 67. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771842&it=r. Accessed 9 July 2017.

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