Poète maudit and vagabond Dimitrie Stelaru was born in 1917 as Dumitru Petrescu in Romania’s border region with Bulgaria. He never knew his biological father, who was killed in action during World War I, and developed such a bad relationship with his stepfather that he was sent to a strict Christian boarding school in Transylvania at the age of fourteen…
Born Isaac Lang in Alsace-Lorraine in 1891, Yvan Goll had one foot in the German avant-garde and the other in the French. Before World War I, when Alsace-Lorraine belonged to the German Empire, Goll briefly participated in the expressionist movement in Berlin. At the outbreak of the war Goll moved to Switzerland to avoid being drafted and there befriended Hans Arp, Picabia and other exiled dadaists…
August Stramm (1874-1915) was born in Münster and educated in Aachen, Germany. After he had graduated from grammar school, Stramm held various positions in the German Postdienst and regularly travelled between Germany and the USA after having been promoted to a position in the Seepostdienst in 1897. Stramm married journalist Else Krafft in 1902 and moved to Berlin three years later. In the German capital…
The Arras is a passage from Ann Radcliffe’s early Gothic novel ‘The Romance of the Forest’, first published in 1791. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) is ranked among the pioneers of the genre. In her novels Radcliffe developed the technique of the ‘explained supernatural’, which had a strong influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Marquis de Sade and Sir Walter Scott…
On Serge Gainsbourg‘s album Mauvaises Nouvelles Des Étoiles (Bad News From The Stars) from 1981 there is a song called Evguénie Sokolov. Although accompanying lyrics were printed on the sleeve, the song itself consists of nothing but farts, gurgling and rumbling accompanied by The Wailers from Jamaica. After all, the lyrics are a passage from Gainsbourg’s story of the same name, in which an artist suffering from incessant windiness is the protagonist…