User:OberMegaTrans/ss2023/AlfredAnderschPublishable

Themes

Alfred Andersch is considered an author of critical post-war literature. In his novels, narratives, audiobooks, and few poems, the key theme is the individual's freedom of will. To elaborate on this, his autobiographic report The Cherries of Freedom was published in 1952, in which Andersch took on his own experience of desertion from the Wehrmacht and subsequently interpreted it as a choice towards freedom in an existential sense.

The novel Flight to Afar takes up this theme again, as well as the following works The Redhead and Efraim, which play through the theme in a contemporary setting. Efraim's protagonist is an emigrated jewish journalist, who partakes in a desperate effort to escape from his reality by introducing himself, a person corroded by self-doubt, into his novel as a fictional character.

Rather than a traditional narration style, Andersch often used assemblages in form of documentaries, citations, and other narrative elements. One example of that would be his novel Winterspelt. A work that is close in style to the one of James Joyce, in which assemblage techniques such as commentary, inner monologues, and chronicle insertions create a war-like atmosphere that tells the story of desertion as an opportunity for one’s individual and collective freedom. Andersch also considered his audiobook Der Tod des James Dean, a story that contains texts of John Dos Passos, a radio assemblage.