ABSTRACT
Having written a doctoral dissertation on the figure of Schinderhannes in the German folk-tradition, Franke went on to produce a documentation in 1977 and a demythologizing biography in 1984 of the same Robin Hood figure. In the anthology Straβen und Plätze (1967) he gave an account of a traumatic childhood experience which eventually prompted the writing of his best-known work to date, Mordverläufe 9/10.XI.38 (1973), which traces the course of the ‘Reichskristallnacht’ in a provincial town and consists of a collage of quotations from police records and newspaper reports, together with topographical information, statistics, etc. In aiming to demonstrate what is typical in this microscopic view of a particular case Franke can be associated with other documentary writers active in a similar spirit at the same time, especially Alexander Kluge. Franke has also written Ein Leben auf Probe (1967), the story of the struggle to survive of a child suffering from a rare illness, Bis der Feind kommt (1970), an autobiographical novel on the last days of the Second World War viewed from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old boy (cf. Gert Hofmann, Unsere Eroberung (1984)) and a biography of the Nazi ‘martyr’ Albert Leo Schlageter in 1980.
