Harry´s Blog

The list of Austrian poets that Herbert Kuhner has rendered into English reads like Who’s Who in modern Austrian poetry.
- Harry Zohn, Brandeis University, Modern Austrian Literature, Riverside, CA
The translations are impressive (poems by Johannes Urzidil). I would like to express my undivided admiration for Herbert Kuhner. He has remained true to the originals and […]

a novel by Herbert Kuhner (excerpt)
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a novel by Herbert Kuhner (excerpt)
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a novel by Herbert Kuhner (excerpt)
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a novel by Herbert Kuhner (excerpt)
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I met Herby in his and my Glenn period. Glenn had been precursor of the new era. But now the word was getting around. Beatle-itus was at its height and the mini-skirt had just come in. Glenn was one of Vienna’s first hippies. Short, well-packed, a broad […]

The Mouth as Launcher
Helen went off to Troy with Paris,
leaving King Menelaus behind in Sparta.
Helen had the face “that launched a thousand ships,”
ships that carried Greeks to fight a war that lasted a decade.
Monica’s mouth was attached
to what may not be the wrong place
under certain circumstances,
but was the wrong place in this instance,
as far as […]

The life of a handsome little boy was snuffed out. He left this earth at the age of 17 months before Christmas of 2007.
His mother’s boyfriend had severely beaten him and sexually abused him.
The mother brought the injured boy to a hospital, where his physical injuries were cared for. Then the authorities returned him to […]

Herbert Kuhner
We were in Locust Valley on the Island at the time. That day was a year after the war had ended. I hated going to school, and that morning I said I wasn’t going to go. I had said the same thing on other mornings, and after saying it I had walked to the […]

Four little girls were killed by a segregationist’s bomb in a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. The perpetrators were monsters who can be compared to the Nazi murderers of children.
Now children are killed on a daily basis by pious men (and women) who pray five times a day.
In 2002 two devout Israelis attempted […]

Herbert Kuhner
The news was a death blow. The death blow! The end was in sight. Soon it would be over and I would embark on life’s greatest adventure. I would cross the border between the world of light and the world of darkness. I would transcend existence. The greatest secret would finally be revealed to […]

from The Assembly-Line Prince
a novel by Herbert Kuhner
I was in the doldrums when Herby’s call came. He had a film Job for me. I was to do the limericks for Hans Fantel’s new sexcapade The Madam’s Hussar. I would also double as English speech coach. Herby was the hussar’s adjunct. The cast was international (and […]

I always loved Campbell’s Tomato Soup. When I was a child, my mother used to serve it to me mixed with milk and with a boiled potato in it. It was my favorite soup dish and I never got tired of eating it. Today I have sentimental attachment to it, although I now prefer Heinz […]

My late friend Dusko Tomovski, who had translated Faust I and II into Macedonian, told me the following story: At the age of fifteen he went up to the mountains to fight with the Tito partisans. At nightfall, he asked a grizzled comrade where he should sleep. The answer was:
“Find the softest stone.”
In 1992 […]

My Uncles Josef, Ernst, Rudi, Heinrich, Fritz, Ludwig and my father were comrades at arms with the air aces, Manfred von Richthofen, Ernst Udet and Hermann Göring in the Great War. The first two were officers in the cavalry and the other five were officers in the infantry.
There were more Jewish officers proportionally than gentiles, […]

Jews have been pushed around for centuries. They’ve been sent to Kingdom Come without being able to do much about it.
In the Nineteenth Century Jews were able to come up in the ranks in Western Europe and achieved a significant place in medicine, science, journalism and the arts.
Early in the Twentieth Century, Dreyfus was […]

“‘Red’ Levine, a cold-blooded contract killer, who was a strict orthodox Jew and therefore did not murder on the Sabbath. Then there was the merciless syndicate boss Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter (sic) who loved his mother more than anything and was respected by the family-minded Sicilians. Or take the strategic genius Meyer Lansky who was not […]