Diabelli

Translated, with an introduction, by Adrian Nathan West / May 2025 / 4.5 x 7, 160 pp. / 978-1-962728-06-5

Diabelli offers the intrepid reader four confessional accounts of linguistic self-destruction: August Stramm, “pianistic abortion” and would-be factotum applying for the post of orchestra minion despite being constitutionally hard of hearing, who posits his musical illiteracy as a key qualification; Diabelli, prestidigitator struggling with his final hocus-pocus crisis, who refuses an invitation to perform and instead discourses on the history of escapology as he contemplates his own final and permanent disappearing act; Anatol Zentgraf, private scholar and maniacal reader who is the alleged epicenter of a devastating earthquake. Added to this first English edition is Burger’s posthumous tale, “The Laughter Artist,” an account of a nameless professional artist of cacchination, the sexually tormented offspring of a genitologist mother—science’s own “mistress of penile plethysmography”—whose backstage visit induces a fatal culmination of his art.

Four disillusioned illusionists—four insistently unique magicians of madness—intent on unveiling life’s elegant deception, each one lifting a different corner of the creative drive to expose the dark underside of art.

Hermann Burger (1942–1989) was a Swiss author, critic, and professor. Author of four novels and several volumes of essays, short fiction, and poetry, he won numerous awards for his work. He first achieved fame with his novel Schilten, the story of a mad village schoolteacher who teaches his students to prepare for death. At the end of his life, he was working on the autobiographical tetralogy Brenner, one of the high points of twentieth-century prose in German.