Paradise with black spots and bruises

Memoires and an Eloquent Emigration into Literary Exile KD Regenbrecht, a German author born in 1950, writes his memoires in English and not in his native language. Why? He says: “I owe the English language just as much as German, in regard to financial and literary aspects. It’s about time to decently take account of that.” Born into post-war Germany with the Allied Forces still omnipresent, he was soon willing to commit himself to certain aspects of the American Way of Art. First it was rock-music, from The Beach Boys to Bob Dylan, then it was literature from Robinson Jeffers to Ernest Hemingway and later from Paul Auster to Thomas Pynchon. There are two more important aspects, he states. The second language granted a greater distance to the subject of his project, his life, his past and his work. Secondly, as he cannot master English to the same degree as German, he hopes for a simpler, clearer and thus more readable language. Not to mention that there are many more native speakers and non-native readers of English in the world compared to German. The author of twenty books of poems, short stories, novels, a play and essays chose a rather big book format to be able to do justice to the many color prints, because his work includes paintings and graphics as well. The reader is taken through seven decades of living and working, of writing and traveling, love and loss, pain and success. We accompany him through the poor and oppressive Fifties of post-war Germany, the pubescent pop era of the Sixties, the Seventies with his studies, the Eighties and Nineties with family life and first steps as an author. There was a personal crisis and big break in 2001 which took quite some time for him to recover from. „Paradise with Black Spots and Bruises“, is a picturesque and painful, an eloquent and elaborate, an unsentimental but sensitive journey into the past and present of someone who experienced a lot and knows how to tell a story.