Streiflichter

The 17 essays on literature and journalism compiled here reflect the critical phases of German history in the 20th century in various ways: the great power chauvinism of the German Empire and specifically of Wilhelm II, the four years of genocide during World War I, the betrayed revolution of 1918/19, the Weimar Republic that led to its own downfall, the barbaric conditions in Hitler's Third Reich, and finally the tensions after 1945 during the Cold War. These issues are illustrated through the works of highly talented German poets and journalists who are hardly known today. Who remembers the brilliant poet Georg Heym, who died at the age of 24, or the contentious journalists Maximilian Harden and Wilhelm Herzog, or the novelist Rudolf Braune, who drowned in the Rhine at the age of 25, or Willi Bredel, whose novel about his martyrdom in the Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp was translated into 17 languages at the time? New works on Anna Seghers conclude the volume. The last of these is an essay titled "Writing Against Oblivion," which explores a fundamental motif of her entire oeuvre.