German Stories/Deutsche Erzählungen: A Bilingual Anthology

Translated and edited by Harry Steinhauer

The short stories in this bilingual anthology are from the works of some of the great masters of the German literary tradition—including Goethe, Kleist, Mann, and Kafka - and offer a representative collection illustrating the development of German fiction from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries.

This book is designed primarily to alleviate the agony that language learning in its early stages entails, when the foreign words in the sentence simply will not combine to make sense. Legions of beginners give up when they could have made it with the aid of a book like this. But for centuries schoolmasters have frowned on this device, calling it dirty names like crib, crutch, pony. But the truth is that highly educated and motivated people have learned to read a foreign language this way. The great German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who knew many ancient and modern languages, acquired them by using Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie as a pony. There are many bilingual series, such as the Loeb Classics or the Bollingen series, which have gained high prestige.

Paperback
464 pages
Text in German and English
University of California Press, 2011
5.5 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
ISBN 9780520268159
Fiction/Short Story