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The time is the 1930s. Our philosopher is Herr Veilchenfeld, a renowned thinker and distinguished professor, who, after his sudden dismissal from the university, has retired to live quietly in a country town in the east of Germany.
Our narrator is Hans, a clever and inquisitive boy. He relates a mix of things he witnesses himself and things he hears about from his father, the town doctor, who sees all sorts of people as he makes his rounds, even Veilchenfeld, with his troubled heart. Veilchenfeld is in decline, it's true—he keeps ever more to himself—but the town is in ever better shape. After the defeat of the Great War and the subsequent years of poverty, things are looking up. The old, worn people are heartened to see it. The young are exhilarated. It is up to them to promote and patrol this new uplifting reality—to make it safe from the likes of Veilchenfeld, whose very existence is an affront to it. And so the doctor listens, and young Hans looks on.
"This unsettling tale concerns the persecution of one man in pre–World War II Germany...Hofmann never uses the words Jew, Nazi, Hitler, or brownshirt…The author surrounds his philosopher with mostly nondescript townspeople who abet, approve, or only quietly, and rarely, censure…A painful, powerful work." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Hofmann (1931–1993) explores terrifying and timeless questions through the gaze of youth in this probing 1986 novel... The result is a delicate tale of innocence unknowingly lost." —Publishers Weekly
"The best novel I've read that describes events through the eyes of a child is little known and a minor masterpiece....Hans, the son of a small-town doctor, watches as the life of his fascinating neighbor, Professor Veilchenfeld, unravels and is then destroyed...In this learned old man, Hofmann condenses the industrialized extermination of millions...To recount it through the limited and fragmented understanding of an innocent child was an inspired authorial choice." —Ian McEwan
This information about Our Philosopher was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gert Hofmann (1931-1993) was a German writer and scholar of German literature. Originally an author of radio plays, he became one of postwar Germany's most prolific novelists, his fiction often examining the continued resonance of Nazism in Germany. His accolades include the Ingeborg-Bachmann Prize and the Alfred Döblin Prize.
Eric Mace-Tessler is a translator and educator. Born in Brooklyn, he has lived in Germany and Switzerland for three decades.
Michael Hofmann is a poet and translator. He is the author of two books of essays and five books of poems, most recently One Lark, One Horse. He has translated several books for NYRB Classics, including Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Jakob Wassermann's My Marriage, and Gert Ledig's Stalin Front, Kurt Tucholsky's Castle Gripsholm, and edited The Voyage That Never Ends, an anthology of writing by Malcolm Lowry.
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