Chronicles of Anti-History

Peter Hamm does not care for books that set out to captivate or "strike" the reader. He prefers those that stimulate and broaden one's perspective or, to remain within martial terminology, those which disarm and strip away mental and ideological armour. He chooses, therefore, to read writers who, in the words of Hermann Lenz, make themselves small in grand times: the poets who regard themselves as chroniclers of anti-history, as failures, the reviled and bullheaded characters who continue to defend the "richness of the world" against the apologists of destruction. The list of writers eulogized in this book is, therefore, far from being a rollcall of literature's big guns. Hamm focuses instead on Celan and Nelly Sachs, von der Vring and Bruno Schulz, Michael Hamburger and Hermann Lenz, Maria Beig and Peter Bichsel, Fernando Pessoa and Robert Walser