Handsome German Books

Feeling nostalgic for the days when I studied German literature as an undergraduate (at Harvard), I pulled out a pair of the most attractive books in my modest collection.

The Goethe volume is the first in the then standard collection of his works--the Hamburger Ausgabe (Hamburg Edition); it contains a selection of his poems, with extensive notes by Erich Trunz (a professor of German literature who is best known for editing the 14 volumes of this edition).

The volume of poetry by Stefan George (1868-1933) (pronounced Geh-OR-geh) displays the stylized typeface which he used in publications of his works. On the web I found that the typeface has actually been recently digitized. The very style of the book cover to me suggests the aristocratic and arcane approach which George took to his work.

I majored in German at Harvard. I then spent two years in Switzerland teaching German to students at the Albert-Schweitzer-College, a very small institution with an international student body, including Americans on junior years abroad. I then did a doctorate at Columbia in NYC on the political and comparative analysis of education, doing research on Germany and other European countries. My career in that field never took off and I eventually went into the financial world--as an analyst of German stocks for three successive German banks in New York. So the German language turned out to be the main continuing aspect of my work experience, checkered as it was.

It was only after retiring from Deutsche Bank in 2001 that I went into bird photography. It's been quite a life--certainly never a dull moment.