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 Spider's Web, published in 1923 in the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung, is an eerie novel. Its theme is the formation of right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism, the spread of which Roth commented on in the newspaper articles of those years with ever-growing concern. While he follows these events from the outside as a journalist, he describes them in his novel from the perspective of a...

Roth's great novel established his world literary reputation: in an inimitable way he drew a careful portrait of that bygone era, which even gains amiable features from the weaknesses and mistakes of the declining monarchy, but at the same time shows the meaninglessness and rigidity of the society, which was almost entirely geared towards the military. The novel is accessible in this edition in...

Job was Roth's first resounding success as an author - and together with the Radetzky March, which appeared a year later, also formed the artistic highlight of his work: the little teacher Mendel Singer experienced great suffering, turned against his God and only found his way back to America at the end of his life the wondrous reunion with his son, who he believed dead, returned to his faith....

With the Radetzky March, Joseph Roth published his first Austria novel in 1932 and had international success with it: the novel about the decline of the Danube monarchy ended in 1916 with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph I. This farewell to the k . u.k. Roth added monarchy to the Capuchin Crypt in 1938. In the form of the first-person narrative, he chose the perspective of a demoralized member...

In 1929, Tucholsky spent the summer vacation with his girlfriend near Gripsholm Castle in Sweden. The stay inspired him to write a summer story about the success and failure of love and the illusion of being able to escape from reality.

'Always shut! Always shut!' Woyzeck is humiliated and exploited by those around him. Based on historical criminal cases, Georg Büchner's drama fragment shows the social background of a murder out of jealousy. Orthographically carefully modernized edition with word explanations.

Expelled from his parents' house as a 'good-for-nothing' by his father, the dreamy miller's son travels the world with nothing but his violin in his luggage, in search of freedom, individuality and artistry. On his travels he meets the love of his life, is disappointed and moves on. But a love letter calls him back... will his dream come true now? The musical novella is considered a masterpiece...

A selection of Hofmannsthal's most important stories. In addition to the fairy tale of the 672nd night, the equestrian story and the experience of the Marshal von Bassompierre, there are also the soldier's story, the moments in Greece or the woman without a shadow, which Hofmannsthal also adapted into an opera libretto.

Outside the Door is rightly considered to be the play that best expresses the self-confidence of those returning from the war after the Second World War – a popular school read, although its ignoring of all other victims of the war has now been critically questioned. And Borchert's short stories like The Rats Are Sleeping at Night or The Bread are among the undisputed classics of the genre.

Discover something new from Hans Fallada: Some of the anecdotes, reports, stories and speeches collected here, which range from the mid-1920s to his death in 1947, are little known or have not yet been published. They reveal the extent to which the author develops a unique feeling for social problems, sensitively observes reality and finds artistic means to design worldly stories with just a...

Zweig's early story was written in 1913 and was published in the same year, but is published here in the 1925 bookprint version revised by its author, which Zweig has 'shortened by numerous passages that were obviously too 'expressive' from his later point of view,' according to the author Editor Michael Scheffel. Zweig masterfully captured the oppressive atmosphere of the story, in which the...