Swiss Schiller Foundation Prize

Austrian Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, for Literature and Science

Ulrich Becher – The Woodchuck Hunt

fiction, new title

704pp (193,200 words)

>> English and French translation available

>> New edition on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the author’s birth

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The Viennese journalist Trebla, fighter pilot in the First World War, is able to escape from Nazi-occupied Austria to neutral Switzerland. But news from the Reich reaches even this refuge, amid the banality of the tourism industry.

Ulrich Becher has an exceptional eye for situations in which absurdity and tragedy intermingle. With pleasure in the bizarre detail and the dramatist’s knack for dialogue, he leads his hero Trebla through the glittering, flashing and effervescent Vienna Prater. In Trebla’s memory of untroubled youthful days, the movement of the Ferris wheel freezes into a macabre symbol of a meaningless time. The up and down of the marionettes, the mechanics of the shooting gallery figures come to reflect manipulated fates, which ultimately make the horrible appear normal and the everyday absurd.

MURMELJAGD is Becher’s masterpiece – a parable of a mad, disturbing time; a great novel about delusion and peril, absurd errors and a manhunt for which the author quite consciously employs elements of the crime novel.

Rights sold

Italy - Baldini

Previously published (rights reverted):

France – Editions Seuil
US – Crown Publishing

audio book - Spektral
paperback - Random House/btb

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Reviews

»This book, once you’ve fallen for it, becomes a life-long drug. It is like a space ship, capable of leaving time and space, departing into the oddest, most hilarious and menacing realms. It is one of those very rare books that seize you with almost physical violence, make you hear, smell, taste, suffer their story.«
Eva Menasse, Die Welt

»An epochal novel. (...) MURMELJAGD is one of the best books that have been published in the German language after 1945.«
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»A wondrously magnificent book: Thankfully, it’s been made available again! A challenge that, fortunately, we may choose to take! An almost offensively lavish novel: Let us be gifted with it!
Readers will follow this ride on the ghost train of a dark age breathlessly yet with composed cheerfulness, thanks to the eminent wit, fathomless self-mockery and deep black humour of this narrator who does not differentiate between the tragic and the grotesque of his time. (...) Today, in an age of rapid linguistic impoverishment, readers will admire the amazing richness of language and the art of differentiation shown by this virtuosic auhor who was at home in many languages and aptly employed sociolects and dialects to characterize his figures. Becher’s language, soaked with wit and irony, has aged surprisingly well over the last four decades. The novel features delightfully eccentric characters, whimsical dialogue, scenes of grotesque folly, of high tension, abundant historical detail, tragic as well as funny elements. (...) A great novel that, hopefully, will find many readers before finally taking its place in the mausoleum of modernism.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Becher’s magnum opus stands for everything that characterizes this author’s work: His wit of language, his talent for word creation, his power of observation and literary dissection (...), here’s a rich imagination, paired with a radical sense of reality, with anger, courage, fear, and fierce, uncompromising morals. All this makes the author Ulrich Becher, as we find him in this book.«
Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

»With this voluminous novel, akin in its meticulous construction to the works of the old masters, Ulrich Becher has written his magnum opus: An inventive and fact-laden read with strong characters, in which recent history is mixed with fictitious fates to produce an exemplary story.«
Der Spiegel

»Is it permitted to laugh about the horrors of national socialism? As for the cast of Ulrich Becher’s narrative, they do, piercingly and extensively, like a reflex. MURMELJAGD is a turbulent, dizzying struggle of words, and the novel of a lifetime.«
Frankfurter Rundschau

»Where is there a German storyteller today whom one can charge with an overabundance of reality? Are they not more often a bit thin-blooded, too reflective, somewhat meager in their passion? Becher’s unique position consists in being the opposite pole.«
Süddeutsche Zeitung

»A tour de force on expulsion and exile, a novel about life under exceptional circumstances, a fantastic story.«
Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten

»Glittering with literary wit, irony and sarcasm.«
Neues Deutschland

»A masterpiece. (...) In an oceanic narrative flow, Becher captures the horrors of the era with linguistic folly, he interlinks life stories with irony and fantasy, and at the same time tells a love story that is as subtle as it is refined.«
Tages-Anzeiger

»The novel alternates between a surprising crime story, a novel of marriage and psychological analysis, and a sweeping work of memoir that, notwithstanding its humurous undertone, keeps its focus on the issue of facism.«
Aargauer Zeitung

»One great writer to be discovered. If not now, when?«
Brigitte

»Becher is a sharp-tongued storyteller, a moralizing tale-spinner. (...) His changing of themes is downright virtuoso - from biting satire to comedic-grotesque dialogue.«
Augsburger Allgemeine

»Becher works magic in turning the flight of an individual into a well-rounded, spot-on picture of the era.«
Frankfurter Neue Presse

»Good and profuse novel material: psychologically, morally and historically charged, full of life, unusual characters, weird details and not least, furiosly written.«
Deutschlandradio

About the author

Ulrich Becher, born in 1910 in Berlin, ranks among the most significant exile writers in the German language. As a student, he belonged to the circle around the painter and caricaturist George Grosz. Becher’s first book was burned in 1933 as »degenerate« literature. Becher fled to Vienna and married the daughter of the satirist Roda Roda. After years in exile – in Brazil, Paris and New York, among other places – Becher lived in Basel until his death in 1990.