Florian Illies‘ THE MAGIC OF SILENCE sold to Sweden and Denmark
He did it again: Florian Illies‘ breaks with genre rules and startles his readers into feverish curiosity into a whole new topic. I am very happy to announce that MAGIC OF SILENCE will be published in Swedish by Norstedts and Danish by Gutkind. Yeah.
- In 2024 the 250th birthday of Caspar David Friedrich will be celebrated with large exhibitions in Greifswald, Winterthur, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden and New York
- Illies once again devotes himself to a new genre and breaks with the conventions of biography
- Instead of writing the life story of the greatest German painter of the Romantic period, which was largely uneventful, he tells the story of Friedrich’s paintings on their long journey to us – and thus 250 years of European history
- rights sold to Russia (Ad Marginem), Italy (Marsilio), Sweden (Norstedts), Denmark (Gutkind)
The adventurous life of Caspar David Friedrich’s pictures of yearning – told thrillingly by Florian Illies
No German painter sparks such strong emotions as Caspar David Friedrich: his evening skies remain icons of longing to this day. He inspired Samuel Beckett to write „Waiting for Godot“ and Walt Disney to create „Bambi“. Goethe, however, was so enraged by the enigmatic melancholy of Friedrich’s paintings that he wanted to smash them on the edge of a table.
In a large-scale journey through time, bestselling author Florian Illies tells the story of Friedrich’s paintings for the first time: countless of his most beautiful paintings were burned, first in his birthplace Greifswald and then in World War II; others, like the „Chalk Cliffs on Rügen,“ emerge from the mists of history a hundred years after Friedrich’s death. Illies tells the story of how Friedrich’s paintings end up at the Russian czar’s court, among a pile of winter tires in a Mafia car repair shop and in the kitchen of a German social housing apartment. Adored by Hitler just as much as by Heinrich von Kleist, passionately hated by Stalin and by the 68ers – 250 years of German history become visible through Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings.
