The turbulent world of Franz Göll : an ordinary Berliner writes the twentieth century /

The turbulent world of Franz Göll : an ordinary Berliner writes the twentieth century /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Fritzsche, Peter, 1959-
Imprint:Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2011.
Description:1 online resource (xi, 260 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations
Language:English
Subject:
Göll, Franz, -- 1899-1984.
Göll, Franz, -- 1899-1984 -- Diaries.
Göll, Franz, -- 1899-1984.
Men -- Germany -- Berlin -- Biography.
German diaries -- Germany -- Berlin -- History and criticism.
German diaries.
Intellectual life.
Men.
Politics and government.
Social conditions.
Berlin (Germany) -- Biography.
Germany -- History -- 20th century -- Biography.
Germany -- Social conditions -- 20th century.
Germany -- Politics and government -- 20th century.
Germany -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.
Berlin (Germany) -- History -- 20th century.
Germany.
Germany -- Berlin.
Electronic books.
Biographies.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Diaries.
History.
Format: E-Resource Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11277900
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780674060951
0674060954
9780674055315
0674055314
Digital file characteristics:text file PDF
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
In English.
Print version record.
Summary:Franz Göll was a thoroughly typical Berliner. He worked as a clerk, sometimes as a postal employee, night watchman, or publisher's assistant. He enjoyed the movies, ate spice cake, wore a fedora, tamed sparrows, and drank beer or schnapps. He lived his entire life in a two-room apartment in Rote Insel, Berlin's famous working-class district. What makes Franz Göll different is that he left behind one of the most comprehensive diaries available from the maelstrom of twentieth-century German life. Deftly weaving in Göll's voice from his diary entries, Fritzsche narrates the quest of an ordinary citizen to make sense of a violent and bewildering century. Peter Fritzsche paints a deeply affecting portrait of a self-educated man seized by an untamable impulse to record, who stayed put for nearly seventy years as history thundered around him. Determined to compose a "symphony" from the music of everyday life, Göll wrote of hungry winters during World War I, the bombing of Berlin, the rape of his neighbors by Russian soldiers in World War II, and the flexing of U.S. superpower during the Reagan years. In his early entries, Göll grappled with the intellectual shockwaves cast by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, and later he struggled to engage with the strange lifestyles that marked Germany's transition to a fluid, dynamic, unmistakably modern society. With expert analysis, Fritzsche shows how one man's thoughts and desires can give poignant shape to the collective experience of twentieth-century life, registering its manifold shocks and rendering them legible.
Fritzsche traces twentieth-century history through the remarkable diaries of an ordinary Berliner. Franz Göll wrote of hungry winters during WWI, the Berlin bombing, rapes by Russian soldiers, shockwaves cast by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, the flexing of U.S. superpower, and the strange lifestyles that marked Germany's transition to modernity.
Other form:Print version: Fritzsche, Peter, 1959- Turbulent world of Franz Göll. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2011 9780674055315
Standard no.:10.4159/harvard.9780674060951
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In a time when public self-disclosure and blogging seem almost de rigueur, examining the diaries kept by a German everyman for the better part of the 20th century is both curious and refreshing. Born in 1899, Franz Goll chronicled everything from the years before the Weimar Republic to the Reagan era-telescoping between personal intimacies ("deeply entwined with his relations with women"), psychological analyses, family history (Goll wrote a complete memoir within his diary), and global change-without traveling much beyond his own borders. Though Fritzsche (Life and Death in the Third Reich) doesn't present extensive English translations of Goll's writings (the originals were impossibly voluminous), the quotations he includes are superb and include many of Goll's poems. He meticulously contextualizes them, convincingly argues the noteworthiness of their rediscovery, and reveals them as subjective attempts to fashion coherence out of increasingly violent times, as conflicting "ego documents" penned by a figure who decried his own passivity and seemed "caught endlessly between the fantasy worlds of poems and panties." Taken together, they are also a sobering record of modern life's impact. Goll's diaries, begun in 1916, when he was 17, and continued until his death in 1984, offer an invaluable and absorbing look at the preoccupations of a turbulent century. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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