Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

This review would’ve been utterly impossible without help from the online community Tuataria, especially Ketie Saner, who translated a lot of German for me and tracked down all kinds of leads. I would never have learned the story of the young farmers without the dogged reporting of Reinhard Pabst in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper. In a 2014 article, Pabst collected other research about the young farmers as well as accounts of the men from their surviving descendants. I am also immensely grateful for Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Powers’s books have been with me for twenty years, and they always seem to find me where and when I need them. A 2014 conversation (archived online at srf.ch) between Christa Miranda and Sander researcher Gabriele Conrath-Scholl was also helpful to me in learning about the photograph. The John Berger quote is from his book About Looking. I’m also indebted to Susanne Lange’s book August Sander in the Photofile series, to the Sander collection August Sander: Face of Our Time, and to the 2013 collection August Sander: People of the 20th Century, edited by Susanne Lange and Gabriele Conrath-Scholl.

Postscript

I’ve had the same German editor (Saskia Heintz at Hanser) and translator (Sophie Zeitz) since my first book was published in 2005. One of the joys of having my books translated is seeing the titles change. In German, The Fault in Our Stars became Das Schicksal ist ein mieser Verr?ter, which translates to something like Fate Is a Lousy Traitor. Fate really is a lousy traitor, and I love that title, as I love the German title of this book. But the best title of any of my books in any language is the Norwegian translation of The Fault in Our Stars. It’s called Faen ta skjebnen—or Fuck Fate.