Down the Mountains

Franz Fühmann (1922–1984) spent his childhood in the contested Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and served in the Wehrmacht signal corps from 1941 to 1945. In a Soviet POW camp he embraced socialism and cast his lot with the new German Democratic Republic. Gradually, however, he became an outspoken critic of the East German regime and the unofficial patriarch of a new dissident literature. Fühmann’s work, which spans everything from essays to children’s literature, departed more and more from Socialist Realist norms, blending and bending genres and delving into mythology, Romanticism, and Expressionism. “Down the Mountains” is taken from Das Judenauto, © 1993 Hinstorff Verlag. The Jew Car was published by Seagull Books in 2013.

Isabel Fargo Cole is a U.S.-born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations include The Jew Car by Franz Fühmann (Seagull Books, 2013), All the Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Seagull Books, 2011), and Boys and Murderers by Hermann Ungar (Twisted Spoon Press, 2006). She is the initiator and co-editor of no-mans-land.org, an online magazine for new German literature in English. Her translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Archipelago, Crab Orchard Review, AGNI, and The Missouri Review, and she has translated two books for Vitalis Verlag in Prague: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Two Prague Stories (2002) and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink (2003). A story of her own has appeared in The Antioch Review. (updated 6/2013)

Her translation of Wolfgang Hilbig‘s “The Abandoned Factory,” first published in AGNI, was reprinted in Harper’s in July 2003.