This novel is a testament of what seemed at the time a fairly ordinary childhood, in the bosom of a normal Nazi family in Landsberg.Returning to her native town in East Germany forty years later, accompanied by her inquisitive and sometimes demanding daughter, Christa Wolf attempts to recapture her past and to clarify memories of growing up in Nazi Germany

     No comparable record of the war at sea exists anywhere... Buchheim's pictures are unique. Ordered on board a submarine as an official artist to send back suitably inspiring renderings of the German Navy in action for propaganda purposes, he was granted a camera and unlimited supplies of film to aid his work , as well as opportunity to use them that was unthinkable for any member of a regular crew. Caught up in the lives of those around him, appalled by what he saw, he began photographing constantly... to capture not the conventional Historical Moments of victory and defeat but the truth of what was taking place, moment by moment, detail by detail. Over 5,000 of his photographs, smuggled into safekeeping, survived World War II. Of these, 205 form this epic photo-essay. 'U-Boar War' reveals the world of its fighting men in long 'takes,' almost like a movie camera... battles above and below the surface; destroyers and merchant vessels exploding and sinking; the agonized tension and concentration of commander and crew struggling to save their sub in the midst of a depth-charge attack; eloquently subjective shots of young sailors as the leave port, their face betraying the awareness that they are being sent on a voyage with no hope of return.The photographs are interwoven with Buchheim's narrative text...the stark data out of which his novel, 'The Boat' first grew.. .and rounded out with an essay by the distinguished German historian Michael Salewski that sets the book in the political and military context of the war as a whole.

    In The Good God of Manhattan, for example Jan, a man from the Old World encounters Jennifer, a woman from the new world in Manhattan, where they fall prey to the perils of love and share the fate of lovers throughout time and place. The Cicadas is the tale of the marooned where the isolation of the island as an escape from the real world is symbolised in the Cicada's song. Though the setting is never stated explicitly in A Deal with Dreams, we assume it is Vienna, the City of Dreams. Here, dreams are for sale in a shady deal offered in the dim light of a pawnshop on a city street. In the end, we learn that the price of dreams is high.