Neue Zeit

Peter Handke, who introduced the author Hermann Lenz, who wrote "neben draußen", to the public in the seventies, considered "Neue Zeit" to be "poetic history lessons". For Hermann Lenz's alter ego Eugen Rapp, the "new era", the period of National Socialism and the Second World War, is a time of exclusion, of external compulsion. The Munich art history student, soon to be engaged to Hanne Trautwein, first had to join the "French campaign" as a soldier in 1940, after which he was commanded to Russia. His stoic behavior alone saved him: to do only what he was expressly ordered to do. "Neue Zeit", first published in 1975, is one of the most captivating books within Lenz's "Biography of the 20th Century". This edition is supplemented by previously unknown documents from the estate of Hermann Lenz: His Fiancée and He Had.