Articles Available Online

  Best known for his bestselling biography of Mozart, Wolfgang Hildesheimer was a polymathic novelist, translator, painter and dramatist A member of the influential literary association Gruppe 47, with Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and Paul Celan, he was extremely well-connected in the world of German publishing and an astute observer of the literary scene As this 1980 letter to his publisher Siegfried Unseld, the formidable director of Suhrkamp Verlag, reveals, he was one of the first to notice the importance of Renata Adler’s experimental novel Speedboat —S W   *   Dear Siegfried,   You were not mistaken in your suspicion that Renata Adler’s Speedboat would ‘hit home’ with me I find it – to use a fashionable word – a captivatingly good book, at least the – more or less – five sixths that I understand: to understand the remaining sixth, one would either have to be an American or know America very well, because it is an eminently American book, and sometimes I lack the key to the metaphors But that does not compromise a reading of the book, because its structure allows you to open it up at random and read it, without being aware of the context, like a breviary   Now you ask me why the book is so good I may assume that you have read it, so that my answer can only be seen as a recommendation to those who have not read it To sum up this answer in a sentence, I would say: here journalism has grown far beyond its own boundaries to create a masterpiece That has, to my knowledge, never happened before, not least because journalism, however outstanding it may sometimes be, must be measured by its currency value, and thus has to respond to a precise theme But I have never read a report whose theme, as here, is nothing less than our life   In general, it does not take any particular analytical perspicacity to unmask our life as an absurd and potentially catastrophic sequence of events, deliberate or otherwise, an implementation of something that is essentially impossible But this book does more than that,