Friday, May 30, 2008
(3:40 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Awful German Language
For a long time now, I've been using Adorno's Minima Moralia as a German reading text, with limited success. Yesterday I returned it to the library and decided to use one of the German texts that I own. I have a pretty good selection of texts by Nietzsche, Kafka, and Benjamin, a volume of Rilke's prose (incl. Malte Laurids Brigge), and Heidegger's Gelassenheit (trans. as "Discourse on Thinking"). (I also have the German text of Phenomenology of Spirit on-hand, but I'm not even going to try that, as it took me over an hour to read the table of contents.)Following in a long-standing tradition, I am polling the readership of this blog to determine which is the most appropriate text for me to attempt to read at this time. The poll options are limited to authors; recommendations of particular texts can be made in comments. Readers are also invited to make arguments in favor of abandoning the attempt to gain a functional reading knowledge of German.
[The poll is no longer working for some reason and is causing the page to load slowly. Thanks to all who voted, even though now I can never know the results.]
