2021 translation by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
A book club discussion of Das deutsche Krokodil (2018) by Ijoma Mangold, translated into English by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp in 2021, entitled The German Crocodile
Read and discuss works by German authors in this series hosted by the Goethe-Institut Washington. All books can be read in English translation or in the German original; our discussion will be in English.
Please Note: In order to participate in the online discussion (carried out over Zoom), registrants must obtain access to the book on their own. Hard copies of the book can be ordered through multiple vendors online; the eBook is also available for download to Kindle, iPad, and other digital reading platforms.
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Das deutsche Krokodil / The German Crocodile, by Ijoma Mangold
Ijoma Alexander Mangold is his full name; he has brown skin and dark curly hair. Today one of Germany's best literary critics, Ijoma remembers his childhood, his teenage years and his early adulthood in this compelling coming-of-age memoir of growing up different in 1970s Heidelberg, in the USA as the German Wall fell, and as a young adult in the new Germany.
His own story is inextricably linked with that of his mother, a German from the eastern province of Silesia, forced to escape as a refugee in the expulsions from 1944, and to start afresh in utter poverty in West Germany. His Nigerian father came to Germany to train in paediatric surgery but returned before Ijoma was old enough to remember him. His reappearance on the scene 22 years later forces a crash collision with an unknown culture, one he grew up suspicious of, and a new complex family history to come to terms with.
Mangold explores many existential questions in this lively narrative; How does a boy cope with an absent father? What was it like to grow up 'bi-racial'? Was he an opportunist, a master adaptor who had over-assimilated? What is the relationship between race and class? And what is more unusual in Germany: having brown skin or a passion for Thomas Mann and Richard Wagner? Ijoma shares his story with its dramatic twists and turns, not forgetting the surprises, he uncovers about himself along the way.
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Ijoma Mangold was born in Heidelberg in 1971 and studied literature and philosophy in Munich and Bologna. After working for the newspapers
Berliner Zeitung and
Süddeutsche Zeitung, he moved to Germany’s weekly
Die Zeit in 2009, where he was literary editor in chief from 2013 to 2018. He is now
Die Zeit’s cultural-political correspondent and one of four literary critics on the SWR show
Lesenswert. Ijoma is regularly on the jury of major prizes for contemporary German literature. A recipient of the Berlin Prize for Literary Criticism, he has also held visiting professorships at the University of Göttingen, Germany and at the University of Saint Louis, USA. Ijoma lives in Berlin.
Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp holds an MA in Translation and Interpreting (University of Bath, 2006) and an MA in Modern and Medieval Languages (University of Oxford, 2003). She holds the IOL Diploma in Translation for all three of the languages she translates from: Arabic, German and Russian.
Kemp was shortlisted in 2016 for a literary translation fellowship from The Arts Foundation. Her translations have been shortlisted for the 2019 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the 2020 GLLI Translated YA Prize, and the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for literary translation from Arabic.
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Discussion of Mangold's memoir will take place virtually via Zoom on Tuesday, March 15, at 6:30pm Eastern. Please RSVP via Eventbrite in order to receive discussion prompts and the Zoom invite link.
Discussion prompts from the facilitator will be emailed to all participants RSVP'd via Eventbrite in advance of the discussion. The Zoom invite and additional directions/tips for accessing the Zoom discussion will be emailed to all participants no less than 48 hours before the discussion begins. The discussion will take place in English.
This month's facilitator will be
Rosemarie Peña. Dr. Peña holds bachelor's degrees in German and Psychology, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in Childhood Studies from Rutger's University in Camden, NJ. Dr. Peña's research explores displaced childhoods with a special focus on the historical and contemporary intersections of transnational adoption and child migration. Her dissertation,
The Rekinning: Portraying Postwar Black German Transnational Adoption, is a discourse analysis of two historical documentary films. She is the founder and president of the Black German Heritage Research Association (BGHRA), an organization which hosts a yearly academic conference on Black German studies.
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