The young soldier Ernst Graeber receives leave from the front for a few weeks - and meets the love of his life in the last days of the Third Reich. Fear, terror and persecution are only now making him realize the senselessness of the war. But it's too late - he has to go back to war...

'All I own are three suitcases.' – A mosaic of the stages of his life emerges from his own letters, feuilletons and selected prose works that describe Joseph Roth’s feelings and impressions of people, situations and political circumstances.

Confession of a Murderer, Told in One Night, written in exile in France, is a parable of the power of evil. For a whole night, the guests of the Russian emigre bar ›Tari-Bari‹ in Paris listen to the confession of Semjon Golubchik, who calls himself a murderer.

The world bestseller for the first time as Fallada wrote it. Too explosive to be printed in this way: a quarter of the original version of the novel that made Hans Fallada an internationally acclaimed best-selling author on the eve of the Nazis' seizure of power has never been published. The seller Johannes Pinneberg and his girlfriend Lämmchen are expecting a child. The couple decides to marry...

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...

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.

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...

Kafka's short prose and stories are key texts of modernity. The selection contains all the important works: early prose from the Meditation collection, the great stories The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, the later collections A Country Doctor and A Hunger Artist, and texts from the estate.

Discover something new from Hans Fallada: Some of the anecdotes, reports, stories and speeches collected here, which range from the mid-1920s to his death in 1947, are little known or have not yet been published. They reveal the extent to which the author develops a unique feeling for social problems, sensitively observes reality and finds artistic means to design worldly stories with just a...

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.