The leviathan, the legendary, huge fish of the Old Testament, ultimately derived from pagan mythology, also received the supervision of the coral from God. Roth's novel of the same name revolves around the life of the small coral trader Nissen Piczenik, who in the end, after losing his business, increasingly disengages from his small village home and his faith and finally dies in the sea. The...

'The appearance of the following scenes is excluded for the time being,' Schnitzler himself wrote about his comedy. Indeed, the first edition (1903) unleashed a wave of outrage. The first performance (1920) was disrupted by controlled demonstrations; further performances were banned, two actors were reported for 'indecency'.

A spark is enough: when a starving boy collapses, the exploited weavers protest in front of the manufacturer's villa in Thirties. The situation escalates. Hauptmann's drama about the Silesian weavers' uprising of 1844 was a political issue - the first public performance in Berlin in 1894 was preceded by a lengthy censorship process, Kaiser Wilhelm II resigned from his box in the »Deutsches...

The open end of Hauptmann's 'thief comedy' in four acts is surprising. So much so that the audience at the world premiere on September 21, 1893 remained irritated and remained seated in the Deutsches Theater. The head of the department, Wehrhahn, a representative of the authorities, certified that the beaver fur thief, Mother Wolffen, was 'an honest person'. How could it come to this? The text...

A chronological selection in which the most important representatives of German literature, who cultivated aphorism as an art form in their own right, have their say with their masterly creations: from Lichtenberg and Goethe to Nietzsche and Karl Kraus to Handke, Botho Strauss and Martin Walser. The publisher Friedemann Spicker has been researching aphorisms for years.

'Stupid boy.' Those two words, uttered by a baker, are enough to destroy Lieutenant Gustl. His honor cannot be restored because his opponent is not capable of satisfaction. With death as the only way out, Gustl wanders through the streets of Vienna. Arthur Schnitzler's novella, designed as an inner monologue, gives direct insight into the consciousness of the (anti)hero who, controlled by...

Professor Unrat torments his students, even follows them privately - right into a nightclub. There, however, he succumbs to the charms of a ding-a-ling singer, and the end of the tyrant is heralded. Heinrich Mann writes about the main character of his novel that she is 'a new expression of the phenomenon that has so often shaken me, power'. With the film The Blue Angel, in which Marlene...

The volume contains Kafka's most important short prose texts from the period up to 1914: Conversation with the Prayer, Conversation with the Drunk, Big Noise, the Collection Contemplation and the great stories The Judgment and In the Penal Colony.

Wolfgang Fruehwald's sensational new edition of Ernst Toller's autobiography, which was awarded a prize by the magazine at that time and was published in hardcover by Reclam in 2011, opens up this important text with a detailed commentary that gives the reader the historical background of the pre-war period, the First World War and the Munich Soviet Republic as well as all appearing persons...

A young couple and three days of happiness - the little prose idyll about the lovers Claire and Wölfchen, who try to escape the everyday life of Berlin's big city, made Kurt Tucholsky famous overnight. His first and lightest book. A wonderful summer read, not only for lovers.

'What comes after?' If life after death were to be what Kurt Tucholsky envisioned, then it wouldn't be bad at all: sitting on a cloud with a friend and contemplating life. In the 1920s he devoted himself to the hereafter, God, human errors and relationships in 20 profound and amusing stories that appeared as a column in the Weltbuehne. With an afterword by Ute Maack. Illustrated by Hannah Kolling.