Interned with thousands of Polish officers in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in September 1939, Jozef Czapski was one of a very small number to survive the massacre in the forest of Katyn´ in April 1940. Memories of Starobielsk portrays these doomed men, some with the detail of a finished portrait, others in vivid sketches that mingle intimacy with respect, as Czapski describes...

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...

Never before have Dmitry Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhensky written documentary prose - only fiction. We never kept diaries. But the invasion of Ukraine changed everything. These diaries are not the fantasy that Oldie is used to. A different language, a different style - to match the circumstances.

In «Der Lärm des Lebens» erzählt Jörg Hartmann auf hinreißende Weise seine Geschichte und die seiner Eltern und Großeltern. Es ist eine Liebeserklärung an die Kraft der Familie - und an den Ruhrpott. Ob es um die Situation seiner gehörlosen Großeltern im Nationalsozialismus geht, die Lebensklugheit seiner Mutter, die für kurze Zeit eine Pommesbude betrieb, die Demenzerkrankung seines Vaters,...

Serhii Dukhno spent 25 days in the Azovstal bunker with his family. ‘Azovstal’ is his native enterprise, the whole family worked at this plant. At first they didn't think of running away from the city, but when a shell hit the playground near their house, leaving a huge hole, they decided to leave. Due to constant shelling, they could not use their car and reached the familiar and reliable...

Leading cultural scholar Vladimir Paperny, author of the book ‘Culture Two’, and Maya Turovskaya, a renowned film critic and co-author of the script for the documentary film ‘Ordinary Fascism’, created a joint project in 2008 dedicated to a comparative analysis of Soviet and American cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. After Turovskaya's death in 2019, Paperny continued the study, expanding its...

Written in 1939 and unpublished until 2000, Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany offers a unique portrait of the lives of ordinary German citizens between the wars. Covering 1907 to 1933, his eyewitness account provides a portrait of a country in constant flux: from the rise of the First Corps, the right-wing voluntary military force set up in 1918 to suppress Communism...

‘Welch ein Anblick für die Welt’, notierte Joseph Goebbels geschockt in seinem Tagebuch. ‘Ein geistig zerrütteter zweiter Mann nach dem Führer. Grauenhaft und unausdenkbar.’ Da war Rudolf Hess soeben zu seinem mysteriösen Flug nach England aufgebrochen, um im Alleingang Frieden zu stiften. Wer war dieser von Rätseln umgebene Mann, der wie ein Schatten Hitlers wirkte, in Nürnberg zu lebenslanger...

Bismarcks »Gedanken und Erinnerungen« sind das bedeutendste Zeugnis politischer Memoirenliteratur in der deutschen Geschichte. Nicht als geschlossene Darstellung seiner politischen Laufbahn oder kontinuierliche Schilderung der historischen Ereignisse entfaltet dieses außergewöhnliche Werk seine Wirkung, sondern als große staatspolitische Reflexion und als brillant erzähltes Erinnerungsbuch, das...