Peter Wortsman

At the Academy, Wortsman explored the dark side of German imagination. In his view, Kafka posthumously cornered the nightmare market with prescient insight. Yet in our adulation of the enigmatic scribe from Prague, we tend to overlook the fact that he was not spawned Athena-like from the cranium of German letters. Kafka had his precursors among the German Romantics, as well as his contemporaries working in kindred veins on the eve of World War I. He had his heirs in postwar East and West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This anthology, including tales by The Brothers Grimm, Tieck, von Eichendorff, von Chamisso, von Kleist, Hoffmann, Heym, Musil, Schwitters, among others, is conceived in the tradition of André Breton’s Anthologie de l’Humour Noir and Jorge Luis Borges’ Antologia de la literatura fantastica. It seeks to (re) introduce to a contemporary English-speaking readership a neglected body of writing—a German tradition that inspired such North American authors as Poe, Hawthorne, and Bierce, as well as Latin American Magical Realists Cortazar, Borges, and others—and to situate those texts at the crossroads of the Götterdämmerung and the twilight zone of the American Dream.