Tag Archives: German literature

RIP Johanna Fürstauer (1931 – 2018)

Johanna Fürstauer was an Austrian writer.

Eros im alten Orient (1965)

By reading Jan Verplaetse’s “Vrouwenpijn en mannenplezier: de antifeministische wortels van sadomasochisme in de Belle Epoque” (1999), I came across Johanna Fürstauer, an Austrian writer who specialized in Sittengeschichte, a famous German euphemism for histories of the vita sexualis. Fürstauer is from the same sex researching generation as Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen.

Above is a picture of the cover of Eros im alten Orient (1965) on Eastern erotica, the debut of Fürstauer.

RIP Edgar Hilsenrath (1926 – 2018)

German writer Edgar Hilsenrath is best-known for his novel The Nazi and the Barber (1971), the story of a German SS mass murderer, who after the war assumes a Jewish identity and escapes to Israel and becomes a zionist. The story is told from his perspective and describes the atrocities he committed.

The Nazi and the Barber (1971), Manor Books edition of 1973.


It is supposedly both funny and gruesome, which earns it its label ‘grotesque’.