The story of nineteen-year-old Paul Baeumer, who went from school to the front as an unsuspecting war volunteer, is now common knowledge. But when you read it again, the impression is again shocking: how Baeumer experiences the whole brutality of the carnage and the senseless deaths of his comrades instead of the hoped-for enthusiasm for the war and a short adventure is touching and outrageous.

The Leviathan tells of the Jewish coral trader Piczenik, who loves the real corals and yet falls victim to the fraud with the fake ones. The short stories The Triumph of Beauty and The Bust of the Emperor are added to this parable of human existence.

Joseph Roth's Radetzky March, that great novel in which a figure in history, the Austrian monarchy, is snatched from transience through the poet's language, is given a strange addition by the novel The Dumb Prophet: the swan song not to a figure of the past history, but melancholic resignation in the face of a powerful utopia of the kingdom of justice, in which all men are brothers, which has...

In this great novel, which first appeared in 1932 and made him internationally famous, Joseph Roth tells of the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, using the example of the Trotta family - the checkered fate of three generations and the downfall of an entire family.

The Escape Without End is a novel by Joseph Roth, which was written in 1927 during the author's trip to Albania and was published by Kurt Wolff in Munich in the same year. According to Roth, the novel is a piece of autobiography. Franz Tunda, lieutenant in the Austrian army, escapes from Russian captivity and finds shelter in the taiga with the Pole Baranowicz in Werchne-Udinsk. In the spring...

Seven prisoners escaped from Westhofen concentration camp. They have re-posed the question of power that had been decided against them for a long time. By fleeing, they circumvent their powerlessness and put their physical and psychological strength to the test in order to assert themselves.

The last novel by the Viennese master. It is a bright early spring day when Therese arrives in Vienna. Behind her lies the boredom of everyday life in a small town, the disappointment of her first love. The officer's daughter from a good family takes on the life of a maid because she wants to live, be free, finally be happy in this seductive city. In his touching novel about women, Schnitzler...

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...

'Always shut! Always shut!' Woyzeck is humiliated and exploited by those around him. Based on historical criminal cases, Georg Büchner's drama fragment shows the social background of a murder out of jealousy. Orthographically carefully modernized edition with word explanations.

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 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...