Three Tearless Histories

‘Powerful inquiries spurred by photos – history made flesh, the untold lives of the mostly forgotten.’ - Kirkus Reviews

‘A missionary voice of human dignity.’ - World Literature Today

Erich Hackl, 2017 recipient of the internationally-recognized Human Rights Award of Upper Austria and winner of multiple literature prizes, brings three little-known and inspiring biographies to light: Gisela Tschofenig’s hidden life in the Austrian resistance; a fragmented interview with Wilhelm Brasse, who photographed Auschwitz inmates and saved evidence of Mengele’s horrific crimes; and the multi-generational story of the Klagsbrunns, who fled Nazism in Vienna only to find another kind of terror in fascist Brazil.

Author Biography

Erich Hackl is an award-winning Austrian author. He was born in Steyr (Upper Austria) in 1954. He studied German and Hispanic Studies in Salzburg and Malaga and was a lecturer for three years at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. On his return to Austria, Hackl was a Spanish teacher and a lecturer at the University of Vienna. Since 1983 he has worked as a translator, editor and freelance writer. He has been a regular contributor to the Wiener Tagebuch, editor of the Aurora-Library, a book series of international poetry, and he is a regular contributor to the WochenZeitung in Zrich. He has published numerous Hispanic literature anthologies, and is recipient of over a dozen literature and translation prizes, including the Premio Hidalgo, the Solothurner Literaturpreis, the Literature Prize of the City of Vienna, and the Austrian Prize for Literary Translation. In 2017 Erich Hackl was awarded the Human Rights Award of Upper Austria (Menschenrechtspreis des Landes Obersterreich) for his “active anti-fascist contribution to the maintenance of humanity and justice of a humanistic society.”