On October 5, 2012, the German national newspaper Die Welt published its daily issue – but things looked... different. Quieter. The sensations of the day, forgotten as soon as they're read, were missing, replaced with an unprecedented calm, extracted...

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contempora...

"I think in pictures. Poems help me with this. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the other. In between, without them, I am lost. They are the handholds where something masses together in the infinite expanse" – Anselm Kiefer...

"I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I've liked too many men". Frank and refreshing, Brigitte Reimann's collected diaries provide a candid account of life in social...

When a young reader once asked Franz Fuhmann if he considered his work to be science fiction, he was quick to deny it: he wanted nothing to do with the genre. As he began writing the stories that make up this volume, however, he found himself coming...

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of pos...

The perfect book for paranoid times, "I" introduces us to W, a mere hanger-on in East Berlin's postmodern underground literary scene. All is not as it appears, though, as W is actually a Stasi informant who reports to the mercurial David Bowie look-a...

"Gone, finito, The End, I say. A father who puts an end to it all before he wears down the whole family deserves more praise than damnation". Two sisters travel to Sofia – in a convoy of luxury limousines arranged by a fellow Bulgarian exile – to...

Christa Wolf was arguably the best-known and most influential writer in the former East Germany. Having grown up during the Nazi regime, she and her family were forced to flee their home like many others, nearly starving to death in the process. Her...

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously wrote that while he did...