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"All Quiet on the Western Front" was the focus of our Literatur Café event in January 2026. To buy tickets to future events and find out more, please visit our Programs page here.By Erich Maria RemarqueTranslated by Kurt Beals An immediate sensation when it was published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide since then, making it the best-selling German novel of all time. Its impact is indisputable: it has been adapted for film, television, and other media; has influenced all subsequent works of war literature; and has been taught in high school and college classes ever since. Until now, one translation—published in 1929, and very much a product of its time—has introduced most readers in English to Remarque's wrenching portrait of the horrors of trench warfare. Now, nearly a century later, renowned translator Kurt Beals recaptures the energy and descriptive force of the German original, rendering Remarque's distinctly terse, telegraphic prose into a contemporary idiom, conveying for a new generation the immediacy and intensity of this classic novel. Hardcover240 pagesLiveright Publishing, 20255.8 x 0.9 x 8.6 inchesISBN 9781324006930Literature, Historical Fiction

All Quiet on the Western Front

By Elisabeth de WaalPreface by Edmund de Waal Unpublished during Elisabeth de Waal's lifetime, The Exiles Return is set in Occupied Vienna in 1954-5. It describes five people who grew up there before the war and have come back to see if they can re-establish the life they have lost. As Edmund de Waal writes in his Preface about his grandmother's highly autobiographical novel, she "was Viennese and this is a novel about being Viennese. As such, it is a novel about exile and about return, about the push and pull of love, anger and despair about a place which is part of your identity." With immaculate precision and sensitivity, de Waal, an exile herself, captures a city rebuilding and relearning its identity, and the people who have to do the same. Mesmerizing and tragic, de Waal has written a masterpiece of European literature, an artifact revealing a moment in our history, clear as a snapshot, but timeless as well. Hardcover328 pagesPersephone Press, 20255.51 x 1.1 x 7.48 inchesISBN 9781903155929Literature, Viennese Occupation

The Exiles Return

By Sally CarsonPreface by Laura Freeman Crooked Cross describes, through the eyes of one ordinary family, the Nazis’ growth in power between December 1932 and August 1933. It is extraordinarily prescient, anticipating all the horrors they were about to inflict on the world, and in this respect it joins a small group of novels, PB no. 39 Manja and PB no. 136 The Oppermanns among them, which were written to try to alert the world to what was happening. The main focus of the novel is on disaffected German youth: it shows with great subtlety that by the early 1930s there was huge unemployment, and a corresponding feeling of futility, and that what the Nazis did so skillfully was to provide a sense of purpose. Crooked Cross is an incisive account on why some young men who feel disaffected, lost or ignored turn towards authoritarian governments. Hardcover380 pagesPersephone Press, 2025Originally published in 19345.51 x 1.1 x 7.48 inchesISBN 9781910263426Literature

Crooked Cross

Gustav Kalhammer (1886-1919)Butterflies, 1907Wiener Werkstätte Postcard 45A 1 card and envelope4 ¾ x 6 ⅞ inches

Gustav Kalhammer, Butterflies, 1907 [Single Card]

Leopoldine Kolbe (1870-1912)Basket of Flowers, 1907Wiener Werkstätte Postcard 44A 1 card and envelope4 ¾ x 6 ⅞ inches

Leopoldine Kolbe, Basket of Flowers, 1907 [Single Card]

By Peter E. Gordon An accessible and authoritative biography of Walter Benjamin that guides the reader through the complexity of his intellectual legacy and the turbulence of his time Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, he developed a unique style of criticism—his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving—that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization. Award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin’s story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin’s life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile, through the romanticism of the youth movements and the conflicts over modernism and Marxism, Gordon brings Benjamin to life. Hardcover224 Pages, 8 black and white illustrationsYale University Press, 20265.75 × 8.25 inISBN 9780300216868Biography, Philosophy

Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver

By Elisabeth de Waal Anita, who has lived in Austria through the Second World War, comes to live in a large English country house in the early 1950s. She forms a close bond with its elderly owner, Mr Barlow, and another with his grandson Tony. But what does the future hold for any of them, for the house, and for England itself? Paperback322 pagesPersephone Press, 20195.51 x 1.1 x 7.48 inchesISBN 9781910263211 Literature

Milton Place

By Gabriele TergitTranslated by Sophie Duvernoy "A blend of page-turner and the highest literary quality." ―Der Tagesspiegel "Anyone who reads it will accompany the characters for many decades and take some of them very much to their hearts." ―Berliner Zeitung Three generations of German Jewish family undergo the tumult, upheaval, and brutality of nineteenth and twentieth-century history in this panoramic and skillfully nuanced family drama, rich with gossip and incident, capturing a Germany now lost to time. Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers is a novel, at once epic and intimate, about the lives and fates of three generations of a German Jewish family. Beginning in 1878 and ending in 1948, we follow the Effingers, a family of modest craftsmen from southern Germany, who are joined through marriage to two families of high-society financiers in Berlin, the Goldschmidts and the Oppners. The Effingers soon rise to prominence as one of the most important German industrialist families in Berlin, but with the outbreak of World War I, they fall on hard times and must navigate the tumultuous changes of the Weimar Republic. Full of parties and drama and delicious gossip, and featuring a kaleidoscopic cast of characters, Effingers is a keenly observed account of German Jewish life in all its richness and complexity. Tergit's precise and limpid prose dazzles in Sophie Duvernoy's elegant translation. Woefully underrated when it first appeared in 1951, and only recently rediscovered in Germany, Effingers is a meditation on identity and nationality that establishes Tergit as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Paperback864 pagesNYRB Classics, 20255 x 8 inchesISBN 9781681379791Literature, Fiction

Effingers

By Kai Uwe Schierz, Patrick Rössler, Miriam Krautwurst, & Elizabeth Otto In 1919, the program of the State Bauhaus school in Weimar promised a modern education for the talented, regardless of age and gender, which drew many young women to apply. The Bauhaus-Girl ("Bauhausmädel") Type, described in a January 1930 issue of the magazine Die Woche, knew what she wanted and would succeed. This volume's essays question the euphoria of the time period with the knowledge of Bauhaus members' subsequent destinies. The essays take as exemplary the biographies of Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Margarete Heymann, and Margaretha Reichardt, both during their training and as Bauhaus graduates. Hardcover336 pages, 496 imagesSandstein Verlag, 201927.5 x 22 cmISBN 9783954984596Architecture, Gender

Bauhausmädels: Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Margarete Heymann, Margaretha Reichardt

By A. Grunewald; A. Hultzsch; S. Nozawa e.a. When Ise Gropius (1897–1983) embarked on a three-month trip to Japan with her husband, architect Walter Gropius, in 1954, she proved to be a gifted chronicler. In detailed reports – her only known cohesive writings from the post-war period – she vividly describes the country and its people. With keen wit and understanding, she comments on everything from discussions about reconstruction, lectures, and the Bauhaus exhibition in Tokyo, to evening parties, the role of Japanese women, Zen Buddhism, and the local cuisine. Extensively annotated by art historian and editor Almut Grunewald, this volume publishes Ise’s travelogues in facsimile for the first time. Hardcover152 pagesIdea Books, 202421.7 x 1.5 x 28.4 cmISBN 9783856764548Architecture, History

Cooking Up Dinner Speeches - Ise Gropius in Japan

By Christine Estima A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesensk 's torrid love affair with Franz Kafka. In 1919, Milena Jesensk , a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna's post-war economy, Jesensk must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story "The Stoker" from German to Czech, becoming Kafka's first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesensk is captivated by Kafka's energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesensk 's wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence. Jesensk and Kafka meet twice for lovers' trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual. Paperback384 pagesHouse of Anansi Press, 20255.25 x 1 x 7.75 inchesISBN 9781487013318Biography, Literary History

Letters to Kafka

By Arnold Schoenberg "If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art." In this sharp, uncompromising address, he defends the composer’s duty to the text: not to entertain, not to soothe, but to translate meaning with precision and depth. Music, he argues, must obey something higher than taste—something as exacting, and as rare, as truth itself. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an Austrian composer, theorist, and painter who reshaped modern music from the ground up. As the inventor of the twelve-tone technique, he broke with tradition not for shock, but for necessity—seeking structure where tonality could no longer serve. Paperback20 pagesEris Gems, 20257.64 x 4.33 inchesISBN 9781967751136Music, Aesthetics

Tyranny of Style: Music and the World

By Sigmund Freud, translated by James Stratchey “It is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of a woman as he had it first from his mother." In some of the most densely packed pages that Freud ever wrote, the founder of psychoanalysis demonstrates through literary, mythical, and folktale examples the extraordinary way that wishes manifest themselves in people’s dreams and choices as inverted images. Magisterial and brilliant, this short essay also illuminates Freud’s own preoccupation with his daughter, Anna, at the time that he was writing it. Paperback32 pagesEris Gems, 20257.64 x 4.33 inchesISBN 9781916809512Psychoanalysis, Essay

The Theme of the Three Caskets

By Michelle Young A riveting and stylish saga set in Paris during World War II, The Art Spy uncovers how an unlikely heroine infiltrated the Nazi leadership to save the cultural legacy of the West. On August 25, 1944, Rose Valland, a woman of quiet daring, found herself in a desperate position. From the windows of her beloved Jeu de Paume museum, where she had worked and ultimately spied, she could see the battle to liberate Paris thundering around her. The Jeu de Paume, co-opted by Nazi leadership, was now the Germans' final line of defense. Would the museum curator be killed before she could tell the truth--a story that would mean nothing less than saving humanity's cultural inheritance? Based on troves of previously undiscovered documents, The Art Spy chronicles the brave actions of the key Resistance spy in the heart of the Nazi's art looting headquarters in the French capital. A veritable female Monuments Man, Valland has, until now, been written out of the annals, despite bearing witness to history's largest art theft. While Hitler was amassing stolen art for his future Führermuseum, Valland, his undercover adversary, secretly worked to stop him. At every stage of World War II, Valland was front and center. She came face to face with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, passed crucial information to the Resistance network, put herself deliberately in harm's way to protect the museum and her staff, and faced death during the last hours of Liberation Day. She also singlehandedly provided information to stop the last train of looted artworks--bearing paintings by Picasso, Monet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Braque, Degas, Modigliani, and Toulouse-Lautrec--from leaving France. Vivid and atmospheric, The Art Spy moves from the glittering days of pre-War Paris, home to geniuses of modern culture, including Picasso, Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Le Corbusier, and Frida Kahlo, through the tension-riddled cities and resorts of Europe on the eve of war, to the harrowing years of the Nazi occupation of France when brave people such as Valland risked everything to fight monstrous evil. In the spirit of Hidden Figures, with the sweeping narrative of The Rape of Europa and the depth of The Resistance Quartet, The Art Spy is an extraordinary tale of a female hero whose courage and tenacity in a time of violence and terror is an inspiration for us all. Hardcover400 pagesHarper Collins, 20256 x 1.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9780063295896Art History, Restitution

The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland

By Erich KästnerIllustrated by Walter TrierTranslated by Anthea Bell The book behind the world-famous film — in a new translation by Anthea Bell Luise has ringlets. Lottie has braids. Apart from that they look exactly the same. But they are sure that they have never set eyes on each other in their lives. When the two girls meet at a summer camp and discover the secret behind their similarity, they decide to switch places. Everyone is fooled (apart from the dog) and, despite a few mistakes and misadventures, everything goes to plan for Luise as Lottie and Lottie as Luise – until their father meets a young, beautiful woman and things start to unravel… Funny, moving, affectionate and improbable, The Parent Trap has twice been adapted for film – but the book remains one of the great classics of German children’s literature. Paperback144 pagesAge range: 8-12 yearsPushkin Children's Books, 20255.08 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781805331704Children's Books

The Parent Trap

By Joachim C. FestTranslated by Martin Chalmers “Quietly compelling, elegantly expressed...Not I shrinks the Wagnerian scale of German history in the 1930s and 1940s to chamber music dimensions. It is intensely personal, cleareyed and absolutely riveting.”—New York Times “A stunning portrait of a strenuously anti-Nazi family in Berlin who managed to hang on to their moral convictions during the brutalizing Hitler years...A beautifully written and translated work that creates rare, subtle portraits of Germans.” —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, a portrait of an intellectually rigorous German household opposed to the Nazis and how its members suffered for their political stance. Few writers have deepened our understanding of the Third Reich as much as German historian, biographer, journalist, and critic Joachim Fest. His biography of Adolf Hitler has reached millions of readers around the world. Born in 1926, Fest experienced firsthand the rise of the Nazis, the Second World War, and a catastrophically defeated Germany, thus becoming a vital witness to these difficult years. In this memoir of his childhood and youth, Fest offers a far-reaching view of how he experienced the war and National Socialism. True to the German Bildung tradition, Fest grows up immersed in the works of Goethe, Schiller, Mörike, Rilke, Kleist, Mozart, and Beethoven. His father, a conservative Catholic teacher, opposes the Nazi regime and as a result loses his job and status. Fest is forced to move to a boarding school in the countryside that he despises, and in his effort to come to terms with his father’s strong political convictions, he embarks on a tireless quest for knowledge and moral integrity that will shape the rest of his life and writing career. Paperback464 pagesOther Press, 2025 5.5 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9781635425123History

Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood

By Megan Brandow-Faller & Laura Morowitz Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design challenges the received narrative on the artists, exhibitions, and interpretations of Viennese Modernism. The book centers on three main erasures—the erasure of Jewish artists and critics; erasures relating to gender and sexual identification; and erasures of other marginalized figures and movements. Restoring missing elements to the story of the visual arts in early twentieth-century Vienna, authors investigate issues of gender, race, ethnic and sexual identity, and political affiliation. Both well-studied artists and organizations—such as the Secession and the Austrian Werkbund, and iconic figures such as Klimt and Hoffmann—are explored, as are lesser known figures and movements. The book’s thought-provoking chapters expand the chronological contours and canon of artists surrounding Viennese Modernism to offer original, nuanced, and rich readings of individual works, while offering a more diverse portrait of the period from 1890, through World War II and into the present. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history, design history, architectural history, and European studies. Paperback262 Pages. 10 Color & 38 BW Illustrations Routledge, 202410 x 7 inchesISBN 9781032010533 Design History, Modern Art

Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design

Edited by Ortrud Westheider and Michael Philipp Spanning six decades, three continents, and multiple mediums, this exhibition catalog explores one of the most significant and influential artistic movements of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, painting underwent a profound transformation. Artists no longer wanted to depict the visible; they aspired to a new visual language that reduced artistic expression to an interplay of colors, lines, and shapes; reflected the modern world; and transcended national boundaries. A central figure of this art movement was Wassily Kandinsky, who laid the theoretical foundations with his work Point and Line to Plane. This lushly illustrated and highly researched volume showcases how Geometric Abstraction found radical expression in all its variations in Europe, the USA and beyond. It features more than one hundred works by over seventy artists, including Josef Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Barbara Hepworth, El Lissitzky, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, and Victor Vasarely. Essays by leading scholars illuminate the ways these artists were inspired by the advanced technologies and theories of their time, including concepts of the fourth dimension and the space- time continuum. The authors explore the movement through a transnational lens—from Belgium, Germany, and Great Britain, to France, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United States; and emphasize the long-neglected role of women in the movement’s advancement. Through its insightful essays and stunning visuals, this volume offers a definitive exploration of how geometric abstraction revolutionized modern art and continues to inspire artists across the globe. Hardcover 320 pagesPrestel, 20259.5 x 11.75 inchesISBN 9783791377919Art History, Movements

Kandinsky's Universe: Geometric Abstractions in the 20th Century

By Daniel KehlmannTranslated by Ross Benjamin “Nothing short of brilliant.” —The Wall Street Journal “A surpassingly gifted storyteller.” —The New York Times From “one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today” (Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize–winning author), a visionary tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich. An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator. Hardcover352 pagesSimon & Schuster/Summit Books, 20256 x 1.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9781668087794Historical Fiction, Cinema

The Director

By Padraig Rooney "At last a biography in English of one of the most interesting women of the twentieth century! Schwarzenbach was so far ahead of her time that we are only now beginning to catch up to her. Little happened in the early decades of the twentieth century to which she didn't have a connection. What a life! And what a great way Padraig Rooney has told it." —Carlos Dews, editor of The Collected Works of Carson McCullers “An empathetic portrait of an audacious woman.” —Kirkus Reviews Annemarie Schwarzenbach was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable women, possibly the greatest sexual and political radical of the 1930s. But until now she’s been largely ignored. Born to a wealthy family in Switzerland, as a teenager she rebelled against her domineering pro-Nazi mother. She immersed herself in the antifascist, queer and artistic circles of the German diaspora of the 1930s. Her edgy glamour and androgynous beauty turned heads in the lesbian nightclubs of Weimar Berlin, on the ski slopes of St. Moritz, and in New York's luxury hotels and jazz bars. Constantly on the move, Annemarie chronicled the low and dishonest decade leading to war through her unique journalism, writing and photography. Her work was as adventurous and uncompromising as her personal life, and reveals a deep courage, intelligence, and ambition tragically curtailed by her untimely death. Hardcover332 pagesPolity, 20256.3 x 1.4 x 9.1 inchesISBN 9781509566297Biography

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