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...

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'.

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...

'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.

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.

A representative selection from Heinrich Heine's four large poetry collections: from the early Book of Songs to the New Poems to the Romanzero and the late Poems. A detailed commentary provides information on the genesis of the poems, contemporary references and backgrounds as well as explanations of words.

Ever since it was first published in 1984, this anthology of German poems has been one of the classics in Reclam Verlag's programme. It offers a deliberately short selection of excellent and representative poems by over 100 most important poets in the German language from a period of more than twelve centuries. It has been updated and expanded again and again, now with poems by Elke Erb, Ulrich...