'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...

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.

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 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 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'.

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.