Wolfgang Leonhard was a 13-year-old boy when he had to leave Nazi Germany with his mother and emigrated to the Soviet Union. There he grew up after the arrest of his mother in a home for German and Austrian emigrants, studied at the Moscow Pedagogical College of Foreign Languages and joined the Komsomol. He experienced the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in Moscow and was forcibly resettled...

Lorenz Beckhardt, brought up in a Catholic boarding school, only found out as an adult that he was a Jew and that many of his relatives were victims of the Holocaust. He meticulously follows the history of his family -- from grandfather Fritz Beckhardt, the ardent patriot and World War II pilot, to the generation that after 1945 dared to make a new start in the country of the perpetrators....

Stefan Zweig, European and citizen of the world, cosmopolitan and pacifist, talks about his lost life, from his childhood and youth in Vienna to the time of the First World War and the 1930s, when the shadow of fascism lay over Europe. He describes how it once was and how it will never be again, in passionate, evocative prose. It is the story of an entire generation and a portrait of an epoch...

Wolfgang Fruehwald's sensational new edition of Ernst Toller's autobiography, which was awarded a prize by the magazine at that time and was published in hardcover by Reclam in 2011, opens up this important text with a detailed commentary that gives the reader the historical background of the pre-war period, the First World War and the Munich Soviet Republic as well as all appearing persons...

In this groundbreaking memoir, Starobinets chronicles the devastating loss of her unborn son to a fatal birth defect. After her son’s death, Starobinets suffers from nightmares and panic attacks; the memoir describes her struggle to find sympathy, community, and psychological support for herself and her family. A finalist for the 2018 National Bestseller Prize, Look at Him ignited a firestorm...

He has always been popular, and his world literary status is now recognized: the author Hans Fallada has been completely rediscovered in recent years. It is time to take a new approach to his biography and to evaluate the rich, previously unexplored material.

The first major biography about the GDR's most fascinating author. Carsten Gansel's comprehensive biography provides an exciting reassessment of a writer's life in its ups and downs and a complex work that is currently being discovered and celebrated internationally.

To the large exhibition in the German Historical Museum, curated by Dr. Monika Boll, this special volume is published about one of Germany's most famous songwriters: Wolf Biermann.

The book contains for the first time memories of the Russian Soviet front-line poet, translator David Samoilov (1920-1990). The collection includes memoirs of the poet’s relatives, students, and friends: Veniamin Smekhov, Evgeny Yevtushenko, Igor Guberman, Alexander Gorodnitsky, Alexander Davydov, Viktor Perelygin, Lydia Libedinskaya, Mikhail Kozakov, Yuliy Kim, Tamara Zhirmunskaya, etc. The...

Berlin, Anfang der Dreißigerjahre. Erich Kästner befindet sich auf dem Höhepunkt seines Erfolgs. Dann die Zäsur: Als die Nazis die Macht übernehmen, entscheidet sich Kästner, in Deutschland zu bleiben. Er, der kurz zuvor noch ein Spottgedicht auf Hitler verfasst hat, muss vor Ort mitverfolgen, wie seine Bücher verbrannt werden; bald darauf erhält er Publikationsverbot. Und doch gelingt es ihm,...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) gehörte zu den herausragenden Persönlichkeiten des deutschen Widerstands gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Der evangelische Theologe arbeitete aktiv mit an den Versuchen, das Hitler-Regime gewaltsam zu beseitigen. Im Frühjahr 1943 wurde er verhaftet; im April 1945 erhängte ihn ein SS-Standgericht kurz vor dem Eintreffen der US-Truppen.