Clara Drechsler


Clara Drechsler is a Cologne author and translator who helped shape German pop journalism in the 1980s.

Life

Drechsler wrote mainly for the music magazine Spex, which she co-founded in 1980, and for Miss Vogue. Her most important literary innovation was the invention of a style characterized by numerous apparent trivialities and subjectivities, an innovation of the category "interview", which she transformed into a kind of investigative journalism through radical accuracy. Her interviews with Slayer and the Suicidal Tendencies are considered milestones. In the early 1990s, she left Spex and worked for Haffmans Verlag. Among others, she translated works by Billy Childish, Bret Easton Ellis, Irvine Welsh and Nick Hornby into German.

Articles (selection)

  • Andreas Dorau. Ein Mann will nach oben
  • Au Pairs. Tot aber lebendig
  • The Human League
  • Knacks. Da birst der Zauberwürfel
  • Don't you have a hairdresser you can tell that to?
  • Die Zwinkermänner
  • Paul Weller
  • Style Council. Café Blur
  • Sublime senselessness. Slayer
  • Suicidal Tendencies
  • ''Heiter der Ernst, sinnlos der Sinn, Welt die Kunst!''

Translations (selection)

Literature about Clara Drechsler

  • Clara Drechsler: Lebe sparsam - und koche nach Rezept. Interview with Diedrich Diederichsen. In: Spex 10/1995, pp. 56–59.
  • Ralf Hinz: Clara Drechsler: Pop als Idiosynkrasie. In: Ders.: Cultural Studies and Pop. Zur Kritik der Urteilskraft wissenschaftlicher und journalistischer Rede über populäre Kultur, Opladen, Wiesbaden 1998, pp. 236–246.