Goethe (1749–1832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, and, as Safranksi emphasizes, a statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but also the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski has scoured Goethe’s entire oeuvre, relying on primary sources as well as Goethe's correspondence with contemporaries and their comments to one another, to produce an illuminating portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Set against the cultural and political turmoil of Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goethe, who intersected with almost every great figure of his age, is thrillingly re-created in this monumental biography. As Safranski ultimately shows, Goethe’s greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.

    The place is Nazi Germany. Lilly is not Jewish. She is a typical eight-year-old German girl who is too busy playing in the cemetery her pappa runs to worry about what is going on around her. That is until Hitler and his Nazis interrupt her life. Shadow of the Swastika is based on her life until the end of World War II. Even at a young age, Lilly is a hardheaded girl. She wants her freedom, but the tyranny and oppression of the Third Reich thwarts her desire to do and say as she pleases. Though Lilly grows up in a world of war, hunger, fear and death, she is a survivor and faces each day’s challenges with obstinance, humor, spunk and courage.

    And indeed, mortality, flowers, and powerful aesthetic collisions typify much of Benn’s subsequent work.     Over decades, as he suffered the vicissitudes of an often unkind fate—the death of his mother from cancer; the death of his first wife, Edith; his brief attempt to ingratiate himself with the Nazis, followed by their persecution of him; the suicide of his second wife, Herta—the harsh voice of the poems relented and mellowed. The later Benn—from which Impromptus is chiefly drawn, many of the poems translated into English for the first time—is deeply affecting: the routines and sorrows and meditations of an intelligent, pessimistic, and experienced man. Written in the low unupholstered monologue of the poet talking to himself, these poems are slender ribbons of speech on the naked edge of song and silence.     With this collection of poems and essays, curated and translated by Michael Hofmann—whose Benn translations won the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for best poetry in translation published in Poetry magazine in 2007—Benn, at long last, promises to attain the presence and importance that he so richly deserves.

    It’s a shadow wrapped in a shadow and it screams, but it screams in harsh whispers. This collection explores the blackness within, the gritty underground that hides inside memories and cowers just outside fear. The poems, paired with illustrations from Matthias Matthies work in sync to create a collage of blunt sexuality, masochistic, and sometimes sadistic recollections of love, reflection, and self-exploration.Lindemann paints pictures with his poems, a slave to the vulnerability and sexuality that drives mankind. His words themselves are body modifications that settle on readers, piercing then slowly penetrating and pumping his audience full with a mix of pleasure and pain. A combination of longing, emotional depth, and bestial intuition, these pieces evoke an innate nature to seek pleasure, to ask for forgiveness, to instill blame.On Quiet Nights pulls back the curtains at night and asks readers to think about who they are. Lindemann holds a mirror to soul, capturing desire and need, with the courage to answer some of life’s biggest questions: Who am I? What am I? Why am I?

    That decision cost her family dearly in wartorn Europe, 1945. Ilse grew up on a small farm, with a wonderful family, the woods as a playground and the beaches of the Baltic. Then turmoil followed the German defeat by the Russians and the subsequent occupation. In 31 months under the Russians, Ilse's family is driven from their home, she mourns her missing father, witnesses her mother's rape, sees her grandparents and baby brother succumb to the brutal conditions, and hears of her oldest sister's capture and death in a work prison. Fighting starvation, Ilse crafts ways to coexist with the Russians, scavenging, begging and stealing to help the family survive.

    Beginning with Lederman as a young girl in Poland in 1941, Sheva’s Promise traces her experience in a Nazi ghetto with her mother and sister. Resolved that she must avoid the detention camp to help her family, Lederman obtains a false birth certificate and escapes the ghetto. Through the courage and humanity of a few individuals, she finds work in a hospital in Germany under an assumed identity. With fierce determination and resourcefulness, Lederman manages to elude Nazi capture and eventually immigrates to the United States with her husband.Sheva’s Promise is not only an invaluable piece of historical record but also the work of a gifted writer whose keen eye for detail and skillful attention to language gives readers an unforgettable story.

    How could a sophisticated, civilized nation like Germany sink into an abyss of degradation that had no bottom? How could the SS rulers of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp torture, starve, and murder defenseless prisoners? And how could Nazi doctors use the camp as their personal, ghoulish laboratory? Buchenwald: Hell on a Hilltop, Book 3 in The Buchenwald Trilogy, explores these themes and is a comprehensive examination of the depths of officially sanctioned depravity into which the Third Reich sank.