Dietrich Hessling, arguably one of the most disgusting protagonists in literature, is the prime example of a cowardly opportunist, a 'nazi prefigure,' as Heinrich Mann later put it. Humiliated by his father as the child of a paper manufacturer from the small town of Netzig, Hessling found his place in the beer-loving collective of a fraternity. As a wealthy factory heir, he makes it to the...

In 1929, Tucholsky spent the summer vacation in Sweden with his girlfriend. The stay inspired him to write a summer story: Peter and his girlfriend, the princess, rent Gripsholm Castle for five weeks. They get a visit from their buddy Karlchen and from Billie, the best friend of the princess. They spend their days having fun chatting, swimming and taking long walks. But then they meet a little...

Kafka's stories are not only key texts of modernity, they still amaze and fascinate readers today. The selection includes all important works, Kafka's early prose about the collection Meditation, the great stories The Judgment, The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, the later collections A Country Doctor and A Hunger Artist. These texts were all put into print by Kafka himself. He was also...

Stefan Zweig, European and citizen of the world, cosmopolitan and pacifist, talks about his lost life, from his childhood and youth in Vienna to the time of the First World War and the 1930s, when the shadow of fascism lay over Europe. He describes how it once was and how it will never be again, in passionate, evocative prose. It is the story of an entire generation and a portrait of an epoch...

Traveling with the privy councilor is a very special pleasure. In September 1786, Johann Wolfgang Goethe - 37 years old and bored with his ministerial life - set off south. It goes over the Brenner Pass and to Lake Garda, via Verona to Venice, further via Bologna, Rome and Naples to Sicily. The Italian Journey is one of the most famous travelogues in literary history, but it is also a book...

'This is the story of the musician Johannes Elias Alder, who at the age of twenty-two committed his life to death after deciding not to sleep any longer.' – With his debut novel about the life and death of a musical genius in an Austrian mountain village, Robert Schneider succeeded sensational world success, which was translated into over 30 languages, successfully filmed and became a...

The Brothers Grimm 'watched the people in the mouth' and faithfully wrote down what the fairytale woman said. This is how many people imagine fairy tales to be. It wasn't like that. The Grimms often intervened radically in the texts, smoothed them out, rebuilt them and expanded them.

When Toni Muhr returned to Vienna from the war in the fall of 1916, Emperor Franz Joseph I was being ceremonially buried. Toni's world seems to be getting out of joint in other respects too: his employer quite obviously applied for the chemical patent himself, which he had offered him for sale in vain shortly before he was drafted into military service, and thus made incredible wealth during...

Dietmar Schultke's meticulously researched depiction of the inner-German border and the Berlin Wall contains all relevant information about the bulwark between the two German states, which has been developed into a perfect barrier belt, and the GDR border regime, a time table and selected orders to the border troops of the GDR.

There are often curious, sometimes unbelievable stories behind our terms, idioms and proverbs. Here you learn how the bloody events of the American Civil War gave us the dreaded deadlines, why we speak of butterflies in the stomach when we mean love, and why one should absolutely avoid bringing something to the trapeze.

This novel is set in Paris, the city that became a place of exile for thousands of German refugees. In the spring of 1935, Friedrich Benjamin, a well-known publicist and editor of a German émigré newspaper, was kidnapped by the Nazis. Sepp Trautwein, the music professor and composer expelled from his Munich teaching post, gives up music in order to make Benjamin's cause his own. He fights an...

Feuchtwanger's world-famous family novel They are successful and respected: Gustav, the writer and senior boss, Martin, the businessman, and Edgar, the doctor. But then the unbelievable happened: The Nazis set up their regime with murder and fire. Home is slipping away from the Oppermanns. They have to leave their homes and their friends because they are of Jewish descent.