Three Tearless Histories: The Photographer of Auschwitz and Other Stories

by Erich Hackl, Mike Mitchell (Translator)

Overview

Stirring, poignant stories humanize great historical tragedies with interviews and accounts of individuals affected by the clashes of communism and fascism.

“Powerful inquiries spurred by photos—history made flesh, the untold lives of the mostly forgotten.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A missionary voice of human dignity.”
—World Literature Today

Erich Hackl, 2017 recipient of the internationally-recognized Human Rights Award of Upper Austria and winner of multiple literature prizes, brings three little-known and inspiring biographies to light: young Gisela Tschofenig’s hidden life in the Austrian resistance and her fate; a fragmented interview with Wilhelm Brasse, the Polish political prisoner who photographed Auschwitz inmates and saved evidence of Mengele’s horrific crimes; and the multi-generational story of the Klagsbrunns, who fled Nazism in Vienna only to find another kind of terror in the fascist dictatorship of 1950s Brazil.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780999754443
Publisher:	DoppelHouse Press
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Erich Hackl is an award-winning Austrian author. He was born in Steyr (Upper Austria) in 1954. He studied German and Hispanic Studies in Salzburg and Malaga and was a lecturer for three years at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. On his return to Austria, Hackl was a Spanish teacher and a lecturer at the University of Vienna. Since 1983 he has worked as a translator, editor and freelance writer. He has been a regular contributor to the Wiener Tagebuch, editor of the Aurora-Library, a book series of international poetry, and he is a regular contributor to the WochenZeitung in Zürich. He has published numerous Hispanic literature anthologies, and is recipient of over a dozen literature and translation prizes, including the Premio Hidalgo, the Solothurner Literaturpreis, the Literature Prize of the City of Vienna, and the Austrian Prize for Literary Translation. In 2017 Erich Hackl was awarded the Human Rights Award of Upper Austria (Menschenrechtspreis des Landes Oberösterreich) for his “active anti-fascist contribution to the maintenance of humanity and justice of a humanistic society.”

Table of Contents

Note by the Translator
The Klagsbrunn Family: A Story Coming to Light
The Photographer of Auschwitz
Tschofenig: The Name Behind the Street
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Erich Hackl's subjects are all actual events, fates and biographies. Often with considerable research and effort, he digs deep into the histories of people whose destiny very often have to do with Nazism and / or with Judaism. In his new collection of short [non-fiction] stories Three Tearless Histories, two of which are already published in Austria in newspapers and anthologies, Hackl tells of Jewish people and their destinies. [...] These stories get under one's skin.

Winfried Stanzick

Erich Hackl's subjects are all actual events, fates and biographies. Often with considerable research and effort, he digs deep into the histories of people whose destiny very often have to do with Nazism and / or with Judaism. In his new collection of short [non-fiction] stories Three Tearless Histories, two of which are already published in Austria in newspapers and anthologies, Hackl tells of Jewish people and their destinies. [...] These stories get under one's skin.

—Winfried Stanzick, buecher.de, 5 stars

Hackl’s use of emotional triggers related to injustice and redemption are both subtle and commanding. In the same way that we relate to injustice of the oppressed, this author delivers stunning situations in which innocent families and characters are destroyed by an unjust rule of law. Yet the ultimate value of a book like this lies in the author’s delivery of life between the lines, beyond the vagaries of a reader’s sentient ability to comprehend. Here, Hackl elicits his best and most enduring success.
– Charles S. Weinblatt, New York Journal of Books

Erich Hackl’s concise and hauntingly dense works of prose have gained him a huge audience and great success. At the bottom of his efforts are usually some forgotten beings, victims of our century’s cruel history, with their authentic albeit not exactly remembered biographies. Here Hackl, the Austrian author, overly sensitized perhaps because of his own country’s extreme insensitivities, steps in and tries to bring about an act of belated justice and redemption. This obviates the question whether Hackl is a fiction writer or a historian, a lawyer of the ‘small people’ or a missionary voice of human dignity: he is all of these.
– Erich Wolfgang Skwara, World Literature Today

The books of Erich Hackl have now been translated into 25 languages. As a chronicler, he reminds us of the fate of people who were arrested for racial reasons or because of their political convictions, tortured and murdered. Hackl reconstructs the biographies of those who have been erased from history. [...] He takes care to strive for historical accuracy.
– Michael Opitz, Deutschlandradio Kultur

Highly recommended … a haunting book.
– Samuel Moser, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

From the Publisher

Erich Hackl’s concise and hauntingly dense works of prose have gained him a huge audience and great success. At the bottom of his efforts are usually some forgotten beings, victims of our century’s cruel history, with their authentic albeit not exactly remembered biographies. Here Hackl, the Austrian author, overly sensitized perhaps because of his own country’s extreme insensitivities, steps in and tries to bring about an act of belated justice and redemption. This obviates the question whether Hackl is a fiction writer or a historian, a lawyer of the ‘small people’ or a missionary voice of human dignity: he is all of these.

World Literature Today - Erich Wolfgang Skwara

Highly recommended … a haunting book.

Neue Zurcher Zeitung - Samuel Moser

Hackl’s use of emotional triggers related to injustice and redemption are both subtle and commanding. In the same way that we relate to injustice of the oppressed, this author delivers stunning situations in which innocent families and characters are destroyed by an unjust rule of law. Yet the ultimate value of a book like this lies in the author’s delivery of life between the lines, beyond the vagaries of a reader’s sentient ability to comprehend. Here, Hackl elicits his best and most enduring success.

New York Journal of Books - Charles S. Weinblatt

The books of Erich Hackl have now been translated into 25 languages. As a chronicler, he reminds us of the fate of people who were arrested for racial reasons or because of their political convictions, tortured and murdered. Hackl reconstructs the biographies of those who have been erased from history. [...] He takes care to strive for historical accuracy.

Deutschlandradio Kultur - Michael Opitz

Hackl’s narrative is masterful and compelling.

Der Tagesspiegel

2016-10-11
The clash of fascism and communism on two continents over half a century, as traced through a few family photographs.At one point, author and award-winning translator Hackl (Argentina's Angel, 2014, etc.) describes his methodology as "a question-and-answer carousel between here and there: the basic data, rather sparse, not very vivid, without feelings, which our imagination has to supply." The "our" in the reading of this book is the reader, because even though the elements are tragic, even horrific, the author's tone remains matter-of-fact and speculative. Hackl is like an investigating detective pursuing a case where all the principals are long dead and the few who remain may be reluctant to talk. The first and longest of these files concerns a family threatened by anti-Semitic Austrian fascism; some of them moved to Brazil only to find a "dictatorship [that] must have seemed like a variant of Austro-fascism with a tropical gloss." Two of them attempted to return to Austria but found themselves in what seemed like "a permanently provisional arrangement" between the country that was home and the Brazil that had become home. The piece begins and ends with a photo, though "invisible on this picture are the threads linking times and continents." The second and shortest, "The Photographer of Auschwitz," tells of the prisoner who was a photographer and was charged with documenting new arrivals, taking as many as 50,000 photos. One of the images became indelible—"four Jewish girls, naked, emaciated until they're nothing more than skeletons, looking at us with big eyes. Four thirteen-year-olds who are about to die and are immensely ashamed of their nakedness." Another is "the only cheerful photo from Auschwitz, of a wedding." The third section also features a wedding photo from a concentration camp: two incarcerated dissidents, only one of whom would survive, and the son who tried to come to terms with their history and his life "in time-lapse photography. Because they are years of repressed memory." These powerful inquiries spurred by photos are history made flesh, the untold lives of the mostly forgotten.

Kirkus Reviews