Empfehlungen basierend auf "Letter to the Father/Brief an den Vater: Bilingual Edition (The Schocken Kafka Library)"

Explores Hesse's life to discover what led to his absorption in certain themes and traces the author's impassioned quest for meaning in a fragmented era filled with crises that posed philosophical contradictions for the artist

An invaluable set of career-length interviews with the German genius hailed by François Truffaut as "the most important film director alive"Most of what we've heard about Werner Herzog is untrue. The sheer number of false rumors and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing. Yet Herzog's body of work is one of the most important in postwar European cinema.His international breakthrough came in 1973 with Aguirre, the Wrath of God, in which Klaus Kinski played a crazed Conquistador. For The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Herzog cast in the lead a man who had spent most of his life institutionalized, and two years later he hypnotized his entire cast to make Heart of Glass. He rushed to an explosive volcanic Caribbean island to film La Soufrière, paid homage to F. W. Murnau in a terrifying remake of Nosferatu, and in 1982 dragged a boat over a mountain in the Amazon jungle for Fitzcarraldo. More recently, Herzog has made extraordinary "documentary" films, such as Little Dieter Needs to Fly. His place in cinema history is assured, and Paul Cronin's volume of dialogues provides a forum for Herzog's fascinating views on the things, ideas, and people that have preoccupied him for so many years.This revised edition features new interviews discussing Herzog's films up to From One Second to the Next (2013), as well as additional text from Herzog, his collaborator Herbert Golder, the physicist Lawrence Krauss, and the filmmaker Harmony Korine.

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that "was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history." Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.

“Humanity’s friend, humanity’s critic: 50 years after his death, Albert Camus’s work is more relevant than ever.” — Tagesspiegel, Berlin Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, died in a car crash in 1960. He was 46. He left a substantial but unfinished oeuvre of exceptional beauty and power. Writer, journalist, thinker, playwright and producer, Camus was a man of tremendous vitality, a passionate defender of freedom who put his art at the service of human dignity. He fought constantly against oppression and exploitation and set an example that is still worthy today. Using a combination of extracts from his works, photographs and other archive material, some published here for the first time, Camus’s daughter Catherine leads us clearly but discreetly through the fascinating life and work of a solitary but universal figure. “My children and grandchildren, my nephews and my great-niece did not know him. For their sake I wanted to include photographs of every kind. I wanted to rediscover his laughter, his frivolity, his generosity, rediscover this warm and attentive man, who let me live. I wanted to show that Albert Camus was, as Séverine Gaspari has written, ‘a man among men, and one who tried to be as much a man as he could’.” — Catherine Camus

One of the great American iconoclasts holds forth on politics, war, books and writers, and his personal life in a series of conversations, including his last published interview.During his long career Kurt Vonnegut won international praise for his novels, plays, and essays. In this new anthology of conversations with Vonnegut—which collects interviews from throughout his career—we learn much about what drove Vonnegut to write and how he viewed his work at the end.From Kurt Vonnegut's last interviewIs there another book in you, by chance?No. Look, I’m 84 years old. Writers of fiction have usually done their best work by the time they’re 45. Chess masters are through when they’re 35, and so are baseball players. There are plenty of other people writing. Let them do it.So what’s the old man’s game, then?My country is in ruins. So I’m a fish in a poisoned fishbowl. I’m mostly just heartsick about this. There should have been hope. This should have been a great country. But we are despised all over the world now. I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That’s why I served in World War II, and that’s why I wrote books.When someone reads one of your books, what would you like them to take from the experience?Well, I’d like the guy—or the girl, of course—to put the book down and think, “This is the greatest man who ever lived.”

There has never been a filmmaker like Paul Naschy. Naschy’s involvement in cinema spans 40 years and counting, with work as an actor, screenwriter, director and producer. He has molded his own vision under these assignments and provided an unheard of spectrum of clues to his personality, passions and ethos. If we just speak of the horror genre, Paul Naschy is a distinctive talent. Perhaps one shouldn’t step on the carefully protected toes of the familiar horror "kings" of the past and present, but Naschy is their equal, and in terms of involvement in the genre—as a screenwriter, director and producer—he outdistances every one of them. This is not a man who simply sits by the phone waiting for an agent to call. This autobiography is Naschy’s manifesto of will and dedication. It is also a great read, filled with engaging anecdotes, earthy asides, written with ease and intelligence, brimming with soul and a heart sometimes suffering, all the time passionate.

The Struggle with the Daemon is a brilliant analysis of the European psyche by the great novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig. Zweig studies three giants of German literature and thought: Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche—powerful minds whose ideas were at odds with the scientific positivism of their age; troubled spirits whose intoxicating passions drove them mad but inspired them to great works.Born in Vienna in 1881, Stefan Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg, Austria, between the wars. He enjoyed worldwide literary fame, first as a poet and translator, then as a biographer.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki is remarkable for both his unlikely life story and his brilliant career as the "pope of German letters." His sublimely written autobiography is at once a fascinating adventure tale, an unusual account of German-Jewish relations, a personal rumination on who's who in German culture, and a love letter to literature.Reich-Ranicki's life took him from middle-class childhood to wartime misery to the heights of intellectual celebrity. Born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1920, he moved to Berlin as a boy. There he discovered his passion for literature and began a complex affair with German culture. In 1938, his family was deported back to Poland, where German occupation forced him into the Warsaw Ghetto. As a member of the Jewish resistance, a translator for the Jewish Council, and a man who personally experienced the ghetto's inhumane conditions, Reich-Ranicki gained both a bird's-eye and ground-level view of Nazi barbarism. Written with subtlety and intelligence, his account of this episode is among the most compelling and dramatic ever recorded.He escaped with his wife and spent two years hiding in the cellar of Polish peasants—an incident later immortalized by Günter Grass. After liberation, he joined and then fell out with the Communist Party and was temporarily imprisoned. He began writing and soon became Poland's foremost critical commentator on German literature.When Reich-Ranicki returned to Germany in 1958, his rise was meteoric. In short order, he claimed national celebrity and notoriety as the head of the literary section of the leading newspaper and host of his own television program. He frequently flabbergasted viewers with his bold pronouncements and flexed his power to make or break a writer's career. His list of friends and enemies rapidly expanded to include every influential player on the German literary scene, including Grass and Heinrich Böll. This, together with his keen critical instincts, makes his memoir an indispensable guide to contemporary German culture as well as an absorbing eyewitness history of some of the twentieth century's most important events.

It is 1967, in a Viennese hospital. In separate wards: the narrator named Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering fom one of his periodic bouts of madness. Bernhard traces the growth of an intense friendship between two eccentric, obsessive men who share a passion for music, a strange sense of humor, brutal honesty, and a disgust for bourgeois Vienna."[Wittgenstein's Nephew is] a meditative fugue for mad, brilliant voices on the themes of death, death-in-life and the artist's and thinker's role in society . . . oddly moving and funny at the same time."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune"Mr. Bernhard's memoir about Paul Wittgenstein is a 'confession and a guilty homage to their friendship; it takes the place of the graveside speech he never delivered. In its obsessive, elegant rhythms and narrative eloquence, it resembles a tragic aria by Richard Strauss. . . . This is a memento mori that approaches genius.'"—Richard Locke, Wall Street Journal

These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty. They provide a penetrating look into life in Prague and into Kafka’s accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped and the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt, and his feelings of being an outcast. They offer an account of a life of almost unbearable intensity.From the Trade Paperback edition.The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-13 translated from the German by Joseph KreshThe Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-23 translated from the German by Martin Greenberg with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt