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Manja

by Anna Gmeyner
Persephone book no:

38 39 40


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The Far Cry
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TRANSLATED BY KATE PHILLIPS
PREFACE BY EVA IBBOTSON
552pp
ISBN 9781903155295

Written in 1936-7 by a young Austrian playwright living in exile in London, Manja opens, radically, with five conception scenes all set on the same night in 1920. In the midst of the turbulent Germany of the Weimar Republic, it goes on, equally dramatically, to describe the lives of the children and their families up until 1933 when the Nazis came to power. The four boys and one girl, Manja, become friends, but their companionship is doomed because of the differences between their parents; one father is a left-wing activist, another a Nazi, another a financier, another a Jewish musician.

Yet Manja is far from being a political novel. Its startling originality lies in the way the the political background is perceived, steadily, from the child's point of view. We have all read about Germany in the 1930s from the historian's angle; there is, however, no novel we know of which sees German life during the period from the end of the First World War until 1933 in quite this clear-sighted way.

'What is so unusual,' wrote the playwright Berthold Viertel in 1938, 'is the way the novel contrasts the children's community - in all its idealism, romanticism, decency and enchantment - with the madhouse community of the adults.' Like The Priory, Manja was first published in English in September 1939: a reader 'spent seven nights totally beguiled and shocked by your clever juxtaposition of the two books.'

The Preface is by the author's daughter, writer Eva Ibbotson; the new translation is by Kate Phillips.

Also available as a Persephone eBook
For more on Manja, have a look at the Persephone Perspective.
Endpaper

The endpaper we have used is a Wiener Werkstätte fabric called 'Paul' designed in 1927 in Vienna by Clara Posnanski; the horizontal black lines give a sinister quality to an otherwise gentle design.

Picture Caption

A street in Frankenthal, Germany in 1933, newly renamed Adolf Hitler Strasse


Read What Readers Say

Simon Brett, ‘Slightly Foxed’

‘Manja’ begins on a note of edge-of-the-seat cinematic tension: 112 pages on, at the end of Part One, which I read virtually at a sitting… the reader is left gasping… What makes the book valuable as a historical record and also successful as fiction is the same: it does not rely on our knowledge of What Was To Come. The writing is quite free of the portentousness of hindsight.

Beyond Eden Rock (blogger)

Though this is always a very human story, social changes are so clearly illuminated. The earlier chapters show the consequences of the War and the Peace, on those who fought and lost, and on those who lived through it. The latter chapters show how that leads to the rise of the Nazi party, and to the appalling shift in society that followed. The whole story was profoundly moving; and the knowledge of what was still to come when this story ended made it still more so.The author’s first hand experience of Germany during the time she writes about makes her story so vivid, and that she left the country before she began to write leaves me in no doubt that it is honest and authentic. She told her story so well, using all the skills she must have learned as a dramatist to bring her five families and that Germany that they lived in to life, and in engaging and involving her readers.

GF via Instagram

This is the story of fascism. It is one of the most beautiful and heart-shattering books I have read. (It isn't often a book makes me sob.)

The Captive Reader (blogger)

She has an interesting and engaging writing style, creatively employing tenses and script-style passages of dialogue (often unspoken) to convey her story. Very readable and very enjoyable, this is my favourite Persephone to date.

Categories: Childhood History Overseas Politics Translations

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