Scenes from the Life of a Faun recounts the dreary life of a government worker who escapes the banality of war by researching the exploits of a deserter from the Napoleonic Wars nicknamed The Faun. Brand's Heath deals with the chaos of the immediate postwar period as a writer joins a small community of "survivors" to try to forge a new life. Dark Mirrors is set in a future where civilization has been virtually destroyed; the narrator fears he may be the last man on earth, until the discovery of another creates new fears.All three novels are characterized by Schmidt's unique combination of sharply observed details, sarcastic asides, and wide erudition.

    But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front.While trying to find his regiment and come to terms with the horrors he has seen and committed, the increasingly unstable Bachmann is manipulated by a series of figures from the underbelly of war’s underbelly—deserters and collaborators, corrupt officers and sexual predators—who induce him to carry out their venal missions, which they’ve justified against the background of institutionalized murder going on all around them.Containing dark echoes of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete is an "astonishing and highly original imagining of (the) dimensions of evil including sadistic cruelty, of the condition of being a victim and the madness abroad which constitutes the virtual victory of Hitler if we fail to translate survival into freedom" (Anthony Rudolf).

    He also analyzes the archetypal roles of the officer corps, intellectuals, and women. This work provides fresh perspectives into how dysfunctional psyches, personal ambitions, and ruthless rivalries impacted the creation and evolution of Hitler's Third Reich.

    T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was perhaps one of the two or three greatest of all writers of fantasy. His wonderful tales, translated into many languages and adapted into numerous stage works, have delighted readers for a century and a half. They open our eyes to an extraordinary world of fantasy, poetry, and the supernatural. Remarkable characters come vividly to life. With exciting speed, Hoffmann moves from the firm ground of reality to ambiguity, mystery, and romance. His imaginativeness is unsurpassed, and his handling of allegory, symbolism, and mysticism is unusually skillful. These qualities make his tales some of the most stimulating and enjoyable in the world's literature. They can be read on many levels of enjoyment; as exciting fiction brilliantly told, as a fascinating statement of many of the major concerns of the Romantic era, and as a culmination of German Romantic literature. This collection contains ten of his best tales: "The Golden Flower Pot," "Automata," "A New Year's Eve Adventure," "Nutcracker and the King of Mice," "The Sand-Man," "Rath Krespel," "Tobias Martin, Master Cooper, and His Men," "The Mines of Falun," "Signor Formica," and "The King's Betrothed."

    

    "This is one of the most moving books of our time. It is a war book, an escape book; as a human document it will be widely read. It is called 'East Prussian Diary' by Hans Graf von Lehndorff. It begins with a young civilian surgeon in East prussia in the last year of the war. We see enough of the life of a wartime hospital, his colleagues, their efficient routine, to feel the shock of its disintegration before the German collapse and the Russian invasion. In a few paragraphs we watch an ordered world disappear, as sand castles melt before an incoming wave."When that first great wave recedes, there is only chaos, the endless crowds of patients, but now hardly any medicine, food, or water to fight deadlier diseases. The sack of Konigsberg can be paralleled all too many times in history, but this is a record of our world and our time. There follows life in bondage, where, in the days of Moses, parents hide away their children from the conqueror, where one night, a bar of iron in his hand, confronting a single Russian, the author is tempted to 'slay the Egyptian'. After many escapes and recaptures, he arrives where his aunt is hiding on what were once her own estates: a fantastic world where the only cow for miles is walled up in a house, where rumour says that 12 miles away there is a chicken, where you walk 20 miles in the hope of finding some potatoes. There is dignity and a height and depth of experience in this story, very simply told."Yet however grimly the record goes against man, this human being never thinks of it as a vote against Almighty God. Rather, with strange persistence, he finds God in his dire need: a battered old Bible gets lost again and again, but turns up - there is a kind gesture from the enemy ranks, an act of sacrifice - faith is sustained. When Konigsberg is a sea of flames, and the harbour water is frothed white with a great storm, the doctor and a little band of deaconesses huddle on the roof and watch a rainbow - then turn to their Bible, to the text for the day, to find it is indeed Gen. 9.14.5, the reassurance to Noah, and indeed all mankind, the promise of the rainbow that life, not death, is the last word."