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Mr.
Brecher's Fiasco
A Novel
Martin Kessel
Translated by Brigitte Goldstein
With an afterword by the author
Library of World Fiction, Terrace
Books
"A literary sensation, as explosive
today as in 1932."—Bayerisches
Fernsehen
Infused with the spirit of 1920s Berlin,
Mr. Brecher's Fiasco is one of the great modern novels
about the urban heart of Germany. It was a time of hope and hyperinflation,
sexual liberation and repression, industrialization and unemployment,
and constant political instability—with
the shadow of fascism looming ever larger. Available here for
the first time in English, Kessel's novel draws upon the major
intellectual and social issues of Weimar Germany and is a satire
of the Berlin workplace and the white-collar workers of the city's
mushrooming bureaucracy. His story captures a moment in which
office workers—originally a small, respected, and
privileged sector of the workforce—transformed into
a large and amorphous common class of workers.
In the offices of a large media conglomerate responsible for
all kinds of advertising, Max Brecher considers himself the intellectual
among the clerks. He reflects on the personal relations in the
office, his own situation as an employee and human being, and
the shifts in the values and ideas of life in 1920s Berlin. His
office has its share of interesting characters, such as the corrupt
Dr. Geist, who becomes a hypocrite in order to advance in the
office hierarchy; the lovely Mucki Schopps, a tricky young girl
with whom everyone falls in love; Gudula Öften, who strives
for harmony among her coworkers but never achieves her goal;
and the department head, Mr. Sack, who meets an unfortunate end.
Kessel's scenes are strikingly modern. Many of the actions, complaints,
and frustrations could easily come from a present-day office
novel. He depicts the lives of his characters and the everyday
events of the office with great style and humor. All who have
worked in offices will find something of their experiences in
these stories: there are couplings, accidents, even a suicide
attempt. Some workers are devoted to and fulfilled by their jobs;
others, like Max Brecher, are considerably less so. While his
peers willingly subordinate themselves as cogs in the industrial
machine, Mr. Brecher remains too independent, unable to look
uncritically, unwilling to play the assigned role. And therein
lie the conditions for Mr. Brecher's fiasco.
"This book, which pulls the whole of human comedy through
the needle's eye of an employee's everyday life, is not only
one of the great literary works of the twentieth century and
a major contribution to the 'psychology of the city' comparable
to Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, it is also a project
of disillusionment that is eerily relevant today."—Neue
Züricher Zeitung
Martin Kessel
(1901–1990) was awarded numerous literary prizes, including
the 1926 Kleist Prize, the 1954 Georg Büchner Prize, the
1960 Fontane Prize, and the 1961 Literature Prize of the Bavarian
Academy of the Fine Arts. His work received renewed attention
upon the centenary of his birth.
For more information contact
our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu
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November 2005
LC: 2005005461 PT
440 pp. 6 x 9
ISBN 0-299-21430-3 Cloth $60.00 s
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