In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany than what had come before and what exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on...

Passport to Paris is a witty, pleasantly chatty, richly detailed memoir of a life in emigration and of a dual career in the ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ music worlds. It provides one of the most vivid and refreshingly buoyant accounts of the perilous exodus from the collapsed Russian Empire undertaken by some two million people during the late 1910s and early 1920s, and also includes rare intimate...

In 1960, Adolf Eichmann took to the defendant’s box in Jerusalem and insisted that he was no ‘manager of the Holocaust,’ as his accusers claimed, just a smalltime bureaucrat following orders. Like countless others, Hannah Arendt—covering the trials for The New Yorker—believed him. Eichmann Before Jerusalem challenges this history for the first time, completely reassessing Eichmann’s story and...

In this magnificent collection of Stefan Zweig's short stories the very best and worst of human nature are captured with sharp observation, understanding and vivid empathy. Ranging from love and death to faith restored and hope regained, these stories present a master at work, at the top of his form. Perfectly paced and brimming with passion, these twenty-two tales from a master storyteller of...

Traveling across four continents, from the ruins of Iraq to the savannahs of Kenya, Witold Szablowski tracked down the personal chefs of five dictators known for the oppression and massacre of their own citizens—Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot—and listened to their stories over sweet-and-sour soup, goat-meat pilaf,...

Martin's school is no ordinary school. There are snowball fights, kidnappings, cakes, a parachute jump, a mysterious man called 'No-Smoking' who lives in a railway carriage and a play about a flying classroom. As the Christmas holidays draw near, Martin and his friends - nervous Uli, cynical Sebastian, Johnny, who was rescued by a sea captain, and Matthias, who is always hungry (particularly...

Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, ‘aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . . weak heart, brown hair,’ a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job without security in the...

In these folk tales, young women go on long and perilous quests, wicked stepmothers turn children into geese, and tsars ask dangerous riddles, with help or hindrance from magical dolls, cannibal witches, talking skulls, stolen wives, and brothers disguised as wise birds. Some of the stories here were collected by folklorists during the last two centuries, while the others are reworkings of oral...

Sophie Scholl and the White Rose tells the gripping true story of five Munich university students who set up an underground resistance movement in World War II. The thrilling story of their courage and defiance, brought to life in the Oscar-nominated film Sophie Scholl - The Final Days, is beautifully told in this special 80th anniversary edition of Annette Dumbach & Jud Newborn's...

Written in 1939 and unpublished until 2000, Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany offers a unique portrait of the lives of ordinary German citizens between the wars. Covering 1907 to 1933, his eyewitness account provides a portrait of a country in constant flux: from the rise of the First Corps, the right-wing voluntary military force set up in 1918 to suppress Communism...

Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the...