Der Brief des Lord Chandos

The abstract words crumbled in my mouth like moldy mushrooms: In his famous fictional letter, Hugo von Hofmannsthal succeeds in 1902 like no one else in capturing the doubts about language of his time. The text was quickly regarded as a founding document of a language crisis, a poetic Magna Carta of twentieth-century German literature, and a key text for the poetics of silence in literary modernity. The critical edition provides helpful commentary and traces the impact of this classic work up to the present day.