Des Meisters Werke

VILLON, FRANÇOIS

Edité par Hyperion Verlag, Berlin, 1919

A propos de cet article

The typeface by Tieman in this book is exemplary of decades of the most wonderful bookmaking, with the off-red salmon-coloured intertitles he always utilized. But equally important is the story associated with this, the famed K.L. Ammer translation of French wandering poet Villon. Apart from being magnificent poetry and rhyme and anarchistic gypsy political and sexual radicalism, it s the book Brecht used when he copied five of the best and put them into the Threepenny Opera as his own. Infamous for the court case where he defended against any notion of intellectual copyright as being unutterably bourgeois. If you though dare to copy even a few lines of Brecht, the Suhrkamp Verlag and his lawyers come down hard and heavy. Wily Brecht, and one can hear BB counter, who can afford not to be wily in wily times, swore he felt Austrian all his life so that they d after the War give him Austrian citizenship. Wrote letters about how he loved Salzburg, it was essential to his artistic creativity, etc. The day after he was granted citizenship he moved to East Berlin instead, knowing he was now a foreigner who could get out when the Stalinist regime got too much for him (it never did). Additionally he at the same time gave all legal copyrights and publishing rights to the WEST German publisher Suhrkamp, not to the Peoples Republic in which he chose to live with Helene Weigel and his many mistresses, helpers, intellectual companions. His main intellectual companion Carola Steffin he left in the Soviet Union in a hospital, but BB wrote a lovely unsentimental sentimental poem of solidarity and love for her. Not for him the problematics of his own play Die Massnahme (the Measures Taken), the subject of which was whether to carry comrades along if they slow you down. And boy could he write, linguistically brilliant beyond imagination, anti-fascist, poetic, the works. What to do about such political/aesthetic problematics remains unanswered and unanswerable. Just don t mix genres. Consciousness ain t a material act, though consciousness is material. Simple. Dent on front fore-edge and one small stain near the gold titling, and what s worse, a dreaded ex libris and (even more worse!) a two-line inscription from November 1919, "zum Glückstage. Artur Kampf". Otherwise good unfaded clean condition with perfect vellum spine. The ballads are just stunning, Villon always on the run from the authorities and finally saved last minute from the guillotine by Deus Ex Machina, as was Mack the Knife. N° de réf. du vendeur INDE-C70683

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : Des Meisters Werke

Éditeur : Hyperion Verlag, Berlin

Date d'édition : 1919