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.

His profile was posted publicly in the county seat when Johann Schulz sought refuge with relatives in a Rhenish-Hessian village. He is accused of killing a police officer at a demonstration. The bounty offered becomes a temptation for the villagers, and it is a matter of opinion who finally denounces the cop killer. Because the Nazis advertise in the village.

August 1939. Shimmering heat in Central Europe. The grain is mowed. Holiday season. It might be carefree days, but there's something disturbing in the air. Some say a new war is imminent. The others swear the peace is safe. In this restless August, the world is watching the Obersalzberg. Adolf Hitler spends his summer here. From here he dares a risky game. Hauke Friederichs tells the story of...

Hans Fallada's Unpublished Stories. What a find: Of the stories that Hans Fallada wrote in the course of his life, more than twenty important texts are unknown to readers because they have never been published or were written directly for a magazine. They show the familiar author in top form and at the same time allow us to discover new sides of him. These stories spanning four decades lead...

Exile under palm trees. For centuries, the Cote d'Azur has been a magnet of longing for German writers and painters. Until 1933. After that, the coast with its poetic patina became the refuge of many German artists, and Sanary-sur-Mer became the spiritual center of emigration. Thomas Mann lived here, as did Lion Feuchtwanger, Ludwig Marcuse, Franz Werfel and Bruno Frank. Many artists who had...

People on the run. Marseille in the summer of 1940: those persecuted and threatened by the Nazis gather on the edge of Europe. They rush for visas, certificates and stamps in order to escape overseas into safe exile. In the chaos of the city, in the cafés, on the walk from authority to authority, their paths cross - and for a short time, the lives of others are connected through hopes, dreams...

A new masterpiece by the brilliant feuilletonist Jutta Voigt: clever and entertaining, she tells of the longing for a different life in the GDR. Artists, bohemians, those who failed in the face of real socialism - they all sought the right existence outside the control of the wrong system. At the center of Jutta Voigt's new book is a bohemian who pursued a fundamental interest: the other life....