(Deutsche Fassung hier). Dr Christophe Fricker is a German author writing on friendship and travel, a language and literature teacher, and a translator. His most recent book is an introduction to the works of the controversial and inspiring poet, Stefan George. Stefan George: Gedichte für Dich has been published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin in June, 2011 (#2 on the SZ/NDR List of Best New Non-Fiction Books in November 2011). Fricker is the current Craig-Kade writer in residence at Rutgers University’s Department of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures.
Fricker was born in Wiesbaden in 1978. Having studied Political Science, German, and Musicology at Freiburg, NUS (Singapore), and Dalhousie (Halifax, NS), he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Stefan George at St John’s College, Oxford. He received an award by Junges Literaturforum Hessen Thüringen (1995), was a Killam Scholar and a Lamb & Flag Scholar, President of the Oxford University German Society, editor of Zeichen & Wunder (1996-2001) and Castrum Peregrini (2000-2006), Assistant editor of The German Quarterly (2006-2009), and Translator-in-residence at Junge Oper Rhein-Main (2004-2005). He has served as a peer reviewer for some of North America’s leading modern language journals, including PMLA, The German Quarterly, and Seminar. Until the summer of 2010, he served as Acting Director of the German Language Program at Duke University. He is now based in Bremen.
Fricker’s work is concerned with the communicative role of literature and the significance it can have for a community. It highlights the interplay between the stability of a literary text on the other hand and the particular openness of poetic works on the other. Literary works both call for interpretation and present themselves as one out of many possible interpretations of a given fact. Fricker has edited the correspondence between Friedrich Gundolf and Friedrich Wolters, two friends of George’s (Weimar: Böhlau, 2009).
Fricker’s first collection of poetry, Das schöne Auge des Betrachters, was published by J. Frank in 2008. It was awarded the 2009 Hermann Hesse Förderpreis. The jury’s statement is posted on this website; more information is available on the news pages associated with the book, here on aufenthalte.info. Larkin Terminal — Von fremden Ländern und Menschen, a collection of portraits of places and people, was published in 2009 by Leipzig-based Plöttner Verlag. In 2007, Fricker was awarded a Merkur Essay award for an essay on Singapore.
Christophe Fricker’s collaboration with visual artist, Timothy J. Senior, has resulted in a number of projects, notably their illustrated book of poems and drawings, Das schöne Auge des Betrachters. Timothy J. Senior teaches Neurobiology and Art at Jacobs University, Bremen. His research tries to establish ways in which the long-term consolidation of spatial memory can be visualized in the arts. Senior offers courses on the intersection between sciences and the arts and on the neurological basis of the concept of collective or cultural memory.
Christophe Fricker translated Gilbert & Sullivan’s Schwurgericht (Trial by Jury) and Domenico Cimarosa’s Operndirektor in Nöten (L’impresario in angustie) for productions by Junge Oper Rhein-Main, directed by Judith Wollstädter. Trial by Jury is of course a classic of English musical entertainment and a favourite with schools and independent companies. Cimarosa’s Farsa musicale is another work of musical umpf and hilarity; it brings to the stage the difficulties of — staging an opera.
Together with German literature scholar Bruno Pieger, Fricker edited a special issue of Castrum Peregrini dedicated to the works of Friedrich Hölderlin, their productive reception in literature and music and their translation into other languages. Jane V. Curran, Professor of German at Dalhousie University, and Christophe Fricker, inspired by a graduate course conducted by Dr. Fritz Heuer, produced a new translation of Friedrich Schiller’s seminal essay On Grace and Dignity. The published volume also includes six articles about various aspects of this aesthetic treatise.
- Photos by Marie Isabel Schlinzig.
