Description
Book SynopsisAmerikafahrt by Wolfgang Koeppen is a masterpiece of observation, analysis, and writing, based on his 1958 trip to the United States. A major twentieth-century German writer, Koeppen presents a vivid and fascinating portrait of the US in the late 1950s: its major cities, its literary culture, its troubled race relations, its multi-culturalism...
Trade Review “[In] excellent translation of Koeppen's Amerikafahrt… [the author] traces his travels across the US as he reflects on the state of American culture and its meaning for the future of the Western world…Everywhere he sees technical and material progress but wonders if that will be used for public enlightenment or centralized money-driven consumerism. Seeing the Statue of Liberty, he wonders which symbol predominates, her torch or her unseeing eyes. Given the polarity of contemporary America, Koeppen's interrogation of life in the US resonates today as well as it did when first published…Highly recommended.” · Choice
“To an American, reading it is like being plunged into a fever dream, in which recognizable places and people are distorted into demons—and also, sometimes, into angels. For the fascination of Koeppen’s book is that these two visions of America, as a peaceable, multicultural Heaven and an acquisitive, conformist Hell, never quite manage to cancel one another out.” · Adam Kirsch in The New Republic
Table of Contents Acknowledgements
Introduction
Journey through America
Bibliography
