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    A Riddle
    A Riddle
    A Riddle
    Ebook43 pages28 minutes

    A Riddle

    By Isolde Kurz

    ()

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    About this ebook

    “It is quite clear that one has no use for a person who has no I in a well-ordered police state. But I also have no more use for the police state.” The story of a found manuscript and the intense tale of its enigmatic, amnesiac author: a yarn complete with murder mystery and wily challenges to reader regarding the Nietzschean nature, psychology and politics of identity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIsolde Kurz
    Release dateMay 10, 2017
    ISBN9781370784431
    A Riddle
    Author

    Isolde Kurz

    Isolde Kurz (1853-1944) was a popular, prolific and erudite German writer renowned for her fine style in all genres. She became dazzled by visions of Hitler’s Germany as a new Holy Roman Empire. The Nazis in turn fêted the writer. In her 19th century youth, nationalism had been, as it currently is in many places, liberty’s darling. She did come to distance herself from the fascists as time went on, expressing disdain for their life-negating materialism, and signing a manifesto against nationalist excesses, militarism and antisemitism.

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      Book preview

      A Riddle - Isolde Kurz

      A Riddle

      a translation by

      Becca Menon

      of

      Ein Rätsel

      by

      Isolde Kurz

      [Translate This Page]

      (December 21, 1853 - April 5, 1944)

      A Riddle

      Ein Rätsel

      by

      Isolde Kurz

      www.BeccaBooks.com

      Translation copyright 2018 Becca Menon

      Cover image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Realistic-Human-Skull-Profile-View.svg

      Cover Design by John Bartelstone: www.johnbartelstone.com

      Published by Becca Menon at Smashwords

      The legacy of Isolde Kurz has entered the Public Domain, and some of her works have already been treated to highly legible reprints by Public Domain Archive and Reprints Service, where you can request books on-demand. You can also read the Italienische Erzählungen, of which Ein Rätsel is the final tale, as well as many other of Kurz’s works online as part of Projekt Gutenberg - Klassische Literatur Online.

      CONTENTS

      Notes are hyperlinked on words or phrases since some e-book formats do not support linked endnotes.

      The Author

      A Puzzling Tale

      A Riddle

      The Author

      Creative Commons Image:

      By Photographie Schemboche (Literarische Spuren in Esslingen, S. 66) via Wikimedia Commons

      Isolde Kurz [Translate this page] (1853-1944), once both widely admired and popular, was a prolific and erudite writer renowned for her fine style in a wide array of genres. Her mother, Marie von Brunnow Kurz [Translate this page], like Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Frankenstein author, Mary Shelley, had strong views about the education of women. From von Brunnow, Isolde inherited the liberal, humanitarian outlook that infuses her work. Her father, Hermann Kurz [Translate this page], an eminent writer, was part of the German Romantic movement. From him she received strong nationalist convictions, which had arisen throughout Europe as foreign yokes and arbitrary aristocracies were shaken off. But nationalism that once seemed progressive would become complicated, perverted, inverted.

      Kurz, who lived in Florence for many years at the hub of a community of historically important German thinkers, writers and artists, embodied historical trends that led her to envision a unified, Nazi Germany as the new Holy Roman Empire. But we cringe to observe the collapse of good style along with good sense in a passage from her 1938 memoir (which, unlike her 1939 elegy to Hitler for the

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