The Birdsong Papers

<p><em>The Birdsong Papers</em> which appeared in 1896 as <em>Die Akten des Vogelsangs</em> was Wilhelm Raabe's next-to-last completed narrative. What might be called an anti-Bildungsroman it is widely considered to be the work that secures Raabe's place as a precursor of German modernist fiction writers. </p><p>Its tone is critical of late-nineteenth-century society both German and American with its industrial expansion urbanization pursuit of wealth and erosion of conventional values; but this critical tone also produces an uneasy tension for its narrator Karl Krumhardt a high-ranking bureaucrat with a stake in the stability of that society. </p><p>It is against that social-critical background that Krumhardt's <em>Papers </em>record a coming to terms with a subject - his longtime friend Velten Andres - whose life both fascinates and profoundly unsettles him. Velten is intelligent imaginative idealistic and full of promise; but he cares nothing about his gifts chooses self-imposed seclusion over conformity and carries his individualism to what Jeffrey L. Sammons calls 'a kind of spectacular irrelevance in the conduct of life'. </p><p>With this translation of <em>Die Akten des Vogelsangs</em> the first into English a major work by one of the most respected German writers of the nineteenth century is made accessible to a new international readership.</p>