Into the Dark

We’re sitting in the dark. On the screen, Great Garbo and Erika Mann meet up in 1969 in the Swiss alps and reminisce. What was the deal with Marlene Dietrich and the woman they both had a thing with? When film captured the zeitgeist of a whole era and the Germans had Hollywood and all of America eating out of their hands. And what about Erika Mann’s antifascist cabaret Die Pfeffermühle, which had crowds roaring with laughter while the world descended into darkness? And the censorship after 1933, not just in Germany but also in the USA? Oh – and how well did Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich actually know each other? Who was more daring on the screen? And in life?

Into the Dark is screwball comedy, melodrama, tragedy and romance all in one: a novel as a film, glamorous and highly political. In sophisticated flashbacks, with pace and timing, it looks at the relationship between literature, film, and power in times of staged realities.

»Into the Dark is the title of this glamorous and highly political novel, in which Angela Steidele offers her readers all the seduction of the silver screen. … When you finish the book, a feeling of suspense slowly recedes, you feel the urge to stand up and walk out of the dark of the cinema back into the glare of the outside world. And it is only then that it dawns upon you that you’ve actually been reading a book.« Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Into the Dark is a novel of many voices. It’s tempting to say: a film for the whole family. Great lighting. A wealth of perspectives. Carefully cut. With a penchant for close-ups. And with a strong focus on the present.« Martin Oehlen, Frankfurter Rundschau

»I would like to emphatically assert that this is a true literary blockbuster. … A brilliant biographical novel.« Denis Scheck, WDR 3

»This novel is not just an extraordinary and successful playful and literary cinematic fantasy, it also revolves around the fundamental question of whether memories can be reliable, and how.« Manuela Reichart, WDR

»Into the Dark is Angela Steidele’s feminist riposte to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.« SWR