KOLBENHEYER, Erwin Guido. A Winter Chronicle. Trans. from the German by H. A. Phillips and K. -W. Maurer. London: John Lane at The Bodley Head. 1938. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s pale orange cloth lettered in black to the spine, in the seasonal dust jacket. A very good example, the boards a trifle marked, the binding tight and very gently rolled, the contents clean, fine but for a few creases to page corners. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net) with remnants of reprice sticker here. Very gently bumped, but a pleasing example overall. Uncommon.
The ‘development of a soul’, the story of a commoner and Breslau cobbler, from his heedless exploits and grim adventures of his youth, into his apprenticeship and eventual mastery of the trade—not least from his fearless-thought learnings from the mystical cobbler-philosopher teacher—all foregrounded by the Thirty Years’ War and its barbaric humanitarian effects in Germany. Kolbenheyer is not remembered today mostly due to his insipid ties with the Nazi Party. Pre-war, his work pre-empted and indeed influenced Nazi thought and philosophy, and he became a direct antagonist to Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann and other writers who sought an intellectual collective response to the growing uncertainty of the regime. His works, fiction and non-fiction, became emblematic of the Nazi cult, and on the outbreak of war he was officially added to Goebbels’ Gottbegnadeten-Liste, a list of artists exempted from military service for their so-called ‘indispensability’ to National Socialism. Its very publication suggests the British publishers had little evidence of such facts, but the book nevertheless an interesting exercise in somewhat revisionist glorification of the spirit of the German, specifically Aryan people.
KOLBENHEYER, Erwin Guido. A Winter Chronicle. Trans. from the German by H. A. Phillips and K. -W. Maurer. London: John Lane at The Bodley Head. 1938. 8vo. First British edition. Publisher’s pale orange cloth lettered in black to the spine, in the seasonal dust jacket. A very good example, the boards a trifle marked, the binding tight and very gently rolled, the contents clean, fine but for a few creases to page corners. The dust jacket unclipped (7s 6d net) with remnants of reprice sticker here. Very gently bumped, but a pleasing example overall. Uncommon.
The ‘development of a soul’, the story of a commoner and Breslau cobbler, from his heedless exploits and grim adventures of his youth, into his apprenticeship and eventual mastery of the trade—not least from his fearless-thought learnings from the mystical cobbler-philosopher teacher—all foregrounded by the Thirty Years’ War and its barbaric humanitarian effects in Germany. Kolbenheyer is not remembered today mostly due to his insipid ties with the Nazi Party. Pre-war, his work pre-empted and indeed influenced Nazi thought and philosophy, and he became a direct antagonist to Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann and other writers who sought an intellectual collective response to the growing uncertainty of the regime. His works, fiction and non-fiction, became emblematic of the Nazi cult, and on the outbreak of war he was officially added to Goebbels’ Gottbegnadeten-Liste, a list of artists exempted from military service for their so-called ‘indispensability’ to National Socialism. Its very publication suggests the British publishers had little evidence of such facts, but the book nevertheless an interesting exercise in somewhat revisionist glorification of the spirit of the German, specifically Aryan people.
