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Briefwechsel 1930–1940

Gretel Adorno, Walter Benjamin

Correspondence 1930 - 1940

The correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin began in 1930, but only after Benjamin’s emigration to France did it reach its full intensity, standing not only as a testament to the intellectual Berlin of the twenties, but also as a document of a great friendship that existed independently of the relationship between Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno.

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English world rights (Polity Press), Spanish world rights (Eterna cadencia), France (Gallimard), Japan (Misuzu Shobo)

Briefe und Briefwechsel

Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer

Correspondence 1923-1966

Among the great letter exchanges, the one between Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer is certainly the most intimate.

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English world rights (Polity), Spanish world rights (Cuarenta), France (Bord De L'Eau)

Briefe und Briefwechsel

Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Krenek

Correspondence 1929-1964

In June 1923, Symphony No. 2 by composer Ernst Krenek – only twenty-two years of age at the time – was first performed as part of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein’s Musicians Festival in Kassel. In the audience sat a 19-year-old philosopher who had just started writing his dissertation, showed great interest in music and who experienced this performance as a shock: Theodor W. Adorno.

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»Der liebe Gott wohnt im Detail« Briefwechsel 1939-1969

Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem

»The good Lord lives in the details«

»I really like him and we find that we have an awful lot to say to each other« Gershom Scholem wrote to Walter Benjamin in 1938. With »he« Scholem meant Theodor W. Adorno, the man whom Scholem had recently met in New York. It was to be the beginning of a 30-year-long amicable and intellectual relationship as well as the prelude to a correspondence of more than 200 letters, which impressively documents an entire epoch of German-Jewish intellectual history and is for the first time being published in its entirety.

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English world rights (Polity), Spanish world rights (Eterna Cadencia)

Kriegstagebuch

Ingeborg Bachmann

War Diary

The present volume for the first time compiles the war diary Ingeborg Bachmann kept from late summer 1944 to June 1945, as well as the surviving letters from Jack Hamesh – a unique document of dialogue between the children of the victims and the perpetrators.

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Herzzeit

Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan

Herzzeit

»Books of this stature appear only every few decades.« Deutschlandradio

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Salzburger Bachmann Edition

Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger

»Write down everything that is true«

The hitherto unpublished and unknown correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Magnus Enzensberger allows one to relive how, after the Second World War, two of the most prominent writers in the German language chose to depict and regard the world, literature and the publishing industry, but also how they wished to present and be regarded themselves.

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»Am Strand von Bochum ist allerhand los«

Jurek Becker

On the beach at Bochum there’s a lot going on

Over the course of his life as a writer Jurek Becker has explored many genres. He wrote texts for the cabaret, authored movie scripts, garnered international acclaim with his debut novel Jacob the Liar, published short stories and essays. In his estate drafts were found for most of his works. Among these, drafts for postcards were discovered as well, in which he used the same conceptual approach as he did in his prose works. The number of postcards, which Becker primarily wrote towards the end of his life, shows that his aim in writing them was to bring a moment of joy to friends or family members. Messages of the author about himself were of secondary importance. First and foremost, Jurek Becker was concerned with entertaining the reader for a few minutes. Increasingly, the postcard became the textual form in which the author enjoyed expressing himself. It was, after all, a form that allowed for word games and silliness – and that, on the other hand, off ered the possibility of showing affection without having to disclose too much information about himself.

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Der Briefwechsel Thomas Bernhard/Siegfried Unseld

Thomas Bernhard, Siegfried Unseld

The Correspondence

»If anyone has been hoping for just one last undiscovered drama by Thomas Bernhard, here it is. Its title is Correspondence, its birth spanning from 1961 to Bernhard's death in 1989.« Die Zeit

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Domestic Rights Sales: German Audiobook (Der Hörverlag)

Briefwechsel 1961–1981

Hans Blumenberg, Jacob Taubes

Correspondence 1961–1981

A piece of intellectual history from the former West Germany

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»ich lerne: gläser + tassen spülen«

Bertolt Brecht, Helene Weigel

»i’m learning: to wash glasses + cups«

»Dear Helli, i’m learning: to wash glasses + cups, sweep the floor, take out the rubbish, make scram-bled eggs and soups. i’m teaching myself. i feel very close to you when i’m washing glasses, which you have done for so long, among other things.«

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»etwas ganz und gar Persönliches«

Paul Celan

»an entirely personal matter«

Paul Celan’s exceptional oeuvre of letters – half of them unpublished so far: An oeuvre, on par with the poetic works, of immense stylistic range. Biographically insightful and poetologically fruitful.

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Briefwechsel

Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs

Correspondence

Here are the letters between Nelly Sachs (1891–1970), recipient of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great German-speaking poet Paul Celan (1920–1970). Their correspondence lasted from 1954 until Celan's death by suicide. Sachs died the day Celan was buried.

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»Sommerregen der Liebe«

Sigrid Damm

»Summer rain of love«

Goethe’s letters to Charlotte von Stein are some of the most beautiful examples of world literature. They are intimate documents of Goethe’s first decade at Weimar, which, during his lifetime, was shrouded in silence.

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»Notstandsgesetze von Deiner Hand«

Gudrun Ensslin, Bernward Vesper

»Emergency Laws by Your Hand«

At the beginning of 1968, Gudrun Ensslin left Bernward Vesper and moved with her 7-month-old son Felix to Andreas Baader. Shortly thereafter, two department stores in Frankfurt burned; Baader, Ensslin and Thorwald Proll were arrested as suspected arsonists. Felix went with Vesper and the history of the Red Army Faction (RAF) began to take its course.

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»fuer Zwecke der brutalen Verstaendigung«

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Uwe Johnson

»for means of brutal communication«

In 1959, just after Uwe Johnson’s relocation to West berlin and the publication of his debut novel Speculations About Jakob, the correspondence and friendship between Johnson and Hans Magnus Enzensberger commences. Over the course of eight years they communicate about the situation of literature and politics and discuss the scopes of political activism. At the same time, however, the 161 documents stand testament to an exchange about the possibilities and limits of friendship.

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Der Briefwechsel

Peter Handke, Siegfried Unseld

The Correspondence

»I am happy to announce that after reading your manuscript closely, we have decided to pub-lish your work at Suhrkamp Verlag.« This letter in August 1965 was the start of a correspon-dence consisting of nearly 600 letters in which Peter Handke finally congratulated the pub-lisher on his 75th birthday.

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»In den eigenen Umriss gebannt«

Felix Hartlaub

»Captured in one’s owen silhouette«

Felix Hartlaub (1913-1945), a unique figure of German literature, belongs to the young generation who began writing towads the end of the Weimar Republic and under the dictatorship of National Socialism. His legacy consists mainly of the »War Notebooks«, which were created after the young historian was delegated to German-occupied Paris and later in various locations of the restricted area around the Führer Headquarters, Department for War Diaries. These fragments belong to the most precise, sensitive and densest messages in the German language that have reached us from the years of World War II. This edition, focused on the years between 1939 and 1945, presents works and letters in reliable text form accompanied by exhaustive explanatory annotation.

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Czech Republic (selection, Volox Globator)

»Aus dem Traurigen etwas Schönes machen«

Hermann Hesse

»To make something beautiful out of the sad«

This volume assembles the most important of Hermann Hesse’s letters in the years between 1905 and 1914. They show the by now married writer in the second and third decade of his life, at Lake Constance, in a village oblivious to the world, where he built a house for his family in 1907 and cultivates a large garden with abandon. But soon he becomes tired of this settled life, is drawn into the open, and so he is often on the road for months on end – on books tours across Germany, hiking in Italy and finally on an expedition to Indonesia. At the same time, the success of his early works has made him well known beyond the borders of Germany and an object of desire for publishers and editors.

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»Eine Bresche ins Dunkel der Zeit!«

Hermann Hesse

»A breach into the darkness of time!«

Possibly no other time span saw so many changes in the life of the poet than the years between 1916 and 1923. Even though Hermann Hesse had already left the Germany of the last Emperor for good in 1912, he was still a citizen of this country at war and had to expect his draft to the front at any time. He escaped this fate by the founding of a relief centre for German prisoners of war in Bern and providing them with good books, but in order to do so, he had so sacrifice his poetic production almost entirely up until 1919.

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