The Great Silence: A Novel
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Students taking German literature courses who need public-domain novel selections
- Readers who like twentieth-century German long fiction and prefer psychological and atmospheric description
- Scholars studying Lilienfein or the German narrative tradition of his time
- Readers with intermediate to advanced German reading ability who wish to expand their reading of originals
Not a good fit for
- Genre fiction readers who prefer strong plots and fast-paced narrative
- Beginners with weak German foundations and no parallel translation for assistance
- Readers hoping to obtain a clear chronology of historical events or social data from the book
Reading tips
- First read the first two chapters to confirm the narrative perspective and main character relationships, then decide whether to read closely or straight through.
- Record the scenes where the image of "silence" appears while reading, and observe its correspondence with changes in characters' psychology.
- Use histories of German literature in the first half of the twentieth century to understand the narrative tradition the novel belongs to.
- If reading German is difficult, read chapter summaries before the original text to avoid interrupting reading due to vocabulary obstacles.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- 57
- 58
- 59
- 60
- 61
- 62
- 63
- 64
- 65
- 66
- 67
FAQ
Is this novel highly demanding to read?
What does the title "The Great Silence" refer to?
Is the Project Gutenberg edition suitable for academic citation?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Heinrich Lilienfein (1879–1952) was a German writer. Publicly available information about his life and education is limited, making it difficult to describe his personal career in detail. According to existing records, his work spanned the novel, poetry, and drama, indicating a fairly broad literary range. One of his representative works is the novel Die große Stille (which may be rendered as "The Great Silence"); this novel is the main basis for understanding his fictional style, but only one of his works is held in this collection, which is not enough to present his output as a whole. Overall, Lilienfein belongs among German-language writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and his themes and style still await examination in light of further materials.
