Quote of the Day: March 16, 2011

"Love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being."

- On March 16, 1831 the roman "Notre-Dame de Paris" (Eng. "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame") of French writer and statesman Victor Hugo (February 26, 1802 - Mai 22, 1885) appeared in the bookshops in Paris.

Quote of the Day: March 10, 2011

"Good drama must be drastic."

- German poet and critic Friedrich Schlegel (March 10, 1772 – January 12, 1829) in: Athenäum (1798-1800)

Quote of the Day: March 3, 2011

"Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it."


- French writer and film director Marguerite Duras (April 4, 1914 – March 3, 1996) March 1990 in: International Herald Tribune

Quote of the Day: February 10, 2011

"What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup."

 - Literature Nobel Prize winner in 1958 Boris Pasternak (Feb 10, 1890 - May 30, 1960) Januar 1978 in: The New York Times

Quite Classic Literature: “Dr. Faustus” (Thomas Mann)

Overview: Quite Literature

Masterpiece: “Doctor Faustus” (1947)

Author: Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

Volume: about 600 pages (depends on the edition)

Price: about 10.- € (depends on the edition)

Thomas Mann, sure one the greatest German authors of all time and maybe the greatest of 20^th century literature in the “land of poets and thinkers”.

With “Doctor Faustus”, written between 1943 and 1947 by the Nobel Prize of Literature Winner in 1929, Mann crowned his own doing, his outstanding work with a very complex novel which affects not simply the life of the main figure in this text, the composer Adrian Leverkühn. This masterpiece is about the whole progress of a German nation in their decay of morality and human values facing Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich – the most cruel part of German history, made by itself.

In addition to this, Mann, who was chronically ill when he finished his work with a lot of references to the historical person of Dr. Faust and Goethe’s masterpiece, too, situated this novel in an environment of classical music – inspired by Arnold Schönberg’s Twelve-Tone-Method, the harmonic ideal of Beethoven and many more well-known composers of bygone times.

Last but not least, different famous philosophers built the basis for Thomas Mann’s idea and concept for his literature. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard – the result for his work of this mix-up is tremendous and also pays tribute to these mentioned great thinkers.

If you are interested in profound high-quality literature, 20^th century history not only of Germany, of Europe, Mann’s really magnificent idea of the conditions of human life, some serious insights into classical music and a really elaborated language – this masterpiece is made for you.

One good bet: To catch the meaning of Mann’s literature, it makes sense to read other smaller novels, short stories before. There you can find and understand the concept, die idea behind his work which repeats itself in almost every of his work. Therefore try e.g.: “Death in Venice” or “Tonio Kroger” – both I can just warmly recommend.  

More information:

Wikipedia: Doctor Faustus (by Thomas Mann)

Amazon: Doctor Faustus in Englisch (amazon.co.uk) ; Death in Venice (amazon.co.uk) …

Official homepage: Thomas Mann

Source (book cover): wikipedia

What about Film? Initiating thoughts ::

Film is a comparatively new medium which unifies different arts in a very expressive way. There are e.g. aspects of music to intensify every kind of picture – which could, for itself, an expression of fluent painting, sculpture and more as an extended exhibition of performing arts. And there is also any kind of text presented e.g. in monologues, dialogues or narrative parts. So all in all, film enables a ingenious combination of music, picture, “performance” & literature. So the outstanding opportunities of an interpretation with reference to other media, first of all literature – every film needs a written script – are becoming obvious.

What about Literature? Initiating thoughts ::

Writing is a very old discipline, so our contemporary literature bases on a nearly infinite tradition. There are a lot of ancient and antique sources, which are still used for creating stories as amalgamation of classical ideas and modern reflections on prevailing societies.

Whether the great Greeks, like Homer or Hesiod, with their mythological narrations about the godfather Zeus and his Olympian Empire, the famous Italians Petrarca and Dante, Spanish Cervantes, at some remote period a British poet named Shakespeare, later Germans like Goethe and Schiller, Balzac and Hugo in France, the Russian Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky etc. – the legacy is gigantic.

In respect to that, literature is a magnific field not only to conserve dynamic cultures, it is one of the oldest arts and ways to reveal, express human feelings and conditions of human life on an elaborate level and with the effort of our most important acquirement – the speech.