Franz Fühmann's magnum opus. <p/>At the Burning Abyss is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. <p/> Picking up where his last book, The Jew Car, left off, Fühmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions--Nazism, then socialism--and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl's "unlivable life," as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful, necessary understanding of "the whole human being: in victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendor and in ordure." <p/> In 1982, the German edition of At the Burning Abyss won the West German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its "courage to resist inhumanity." At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost none of its urgency.