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 earliest novels were controversial because they contained veiled criticisms of the Communist regime which landed her on government watch lists. Her past continued to permeate her work and her life, as she said, You can only fight sorrow when you look it in the eye.
Augustis Christa Wolf s last piece of fiction, written in a single...

Martin Mosebach s novelWhat Was Beforeopens with a young couple enjoying a moment of carefree intimacy. Then the young woman, turning slightly more serious, asks her lover that fateful question, one that sounds so innocent but carries toxic seeds of jealousy: What was your life like before you met me? The answer grows into an entire book, an elaborate house of cards, filled with intrigue, sex, betrayal, exotic birds, and far-flung locations.
Set against the backdrop of Frankfurt s affluent suburbs, this elliptical tale of coincidence and necessity unfolds through a series of...

April 30, 1945, marked an end of sorts in the Third Reich. The last business day before a national holiday and then a series of transfers of power, April 30 was a day filled with contradictions and bewildering events that would forever define global history. It was on this day that while the Red Army occupied Berlin, Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker, and, in San Francisco, the United Nations was being founded.
Alexander Kluge's latest book, 30 April 1945, covers this single historic day and unravels its passing hours across the different theaters of the Second...

Werner Braunig was once regarded as the great hope of East German literature until an extract from "Rummelplatz" was read before the East German censorship authorities in 1965, and fierce opposition summarily sealed its fate. The novel s sin? It painted an all too accurate picture of East German society.
"Rummelplatz," translated here by Samuel P. Willcocks, focuses on a notorious East German uranium mine, run by the Soviets and supplying the brotherland s nuclear program. Veterans, fortune seekers, and outsiders with tenuous family ties like narrator Peter Loose flock to the well-paying...