Addendum to Post on German Horror

Die Schattenuhr

I have been exploring German horror on the web since my last post, particularly the photos of the German Horror Writers Circle on Facebook, where I found this really beautiful, really cool cover that I just had to share.  The post is by Nina Horvath and says “Cover zu ‘Die Schattenuhr’, erstellt von Mark Freier nach einem Werk von Zdzisław Beksiński” (Cover to ‘The Clock of Shadows’, published by Mark Freier after a work by Zdzisław Beksiński).  At the very top of the page, “Die Bizarre Welt des Edgar Allen Poe” translates to “The Bizarre World of Edgar Allen Poe”.  One thing I have already learned about horror in Germany is that American horror is very popular over there–in particular Lovecraft and Poe.

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Author: Phil Slattery

Publisher, Rural Fiction Magazine; publisher, The Chamber Magazine; founder, the Farmington Writers Circle. I have written short stories and poetry for many years. In my careers as a Naval officer and in the federal government, I have written thousands of documents of many types. I am currently working on a second edition for my poetry collection and a few novels.

3 thoughts on “Addendum to Post on German Horror”

    1. It probably translates very well. What would be difficult for Germans would be all the subtle nuances of our culture, particularly of our past, that we take for granted and maybe vaguely imply in writing. It would be the same for us, of course, reading a story set in Germany in, say, Poe’s era of the 1840s. As Americans, we have some familiarity with the antiques and customs of our past, if for no other reason than being dragged off to various museums for grade-school field trips. Therefore, as a culture, we have some vaguea priori sense of how our past appeared. Unless they have deliberately studied American history intently, most Germans (or other cultures for that matter) will not have that sense. Americans can visualize in their minds’ eyes how a typical log cabin of the 1840s might have appeared inside, but for a German it would be as difficult for them to visualize a log cabin’s interior as it would be for us to accurately visualize the interior of a German house of the same period.

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