Eva Schobel - Albert Drach: A Raging Sage

When the writer and lawyer Albert Drach (1902-1995) was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize of the German Academy for Language and Letters in 1988, there was great astonishment even in usually well-informed literary circles. Albert Drach – who? A man who had caused a sensation in the 60s and 70s with novels such as "Das große Protokoll gegen Zwetschkenbaum" [The Massive File on Zwetschkenbaum, trans. Harvey I. Dunkle] and "Untersuchung an Mädeln", who was mistakenly hailed as the new Herzmanovsky-Orlando and finally forgotten again. But the Drach renaissance initiated by the Büchner Prize brought the decisive turning point. A new generation of readers and critics discovered in Drach (now aged 86) – whom the Times Literary Supplemement had counted in the same breath as Elias Canetti as being amongst the "most important avant-gardists in the German language" – one of the most original and radical writers after 1945. In 1988, Eva Schobel began her series of conversations with the author. She encountered a still raging but wise man who judged the Austria of the Second Republic, contemporary literature, and also his own life and work, with provocative severity.