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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...