The German Crocodile

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Ijoma Mangold, today one of Germany's best literary critics remembers his youth in this compelling coming-of-age memoir of growing up different in 1970s Heidelberg, and his contrasting experiences during momentous visits in early adulthood to the USA and Nigeria. 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 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. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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.

Translated into English by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp