Conversations & Correspondences

In March 1925, 21-year-old Dr. Theodor Wiesengrund moves to Vienna for a few months to continue his training in composition with Alban Berg. Berg introduces him to the Vienna string quartet and its 28-year-old lead violinist Rudolf Kolisch, one of the most important interpreters of the New Music of the Schönberg school. Adorno and Kolisch quickly become friends and begin an extensive...

»Surrounded by the Flutters of Western and Eastern Lures« ‒ the title of this volume of correspondence refers to the wooing of both West and East German cultural institutions and interest groups that set in after Hesse had been awarded the Nobel Prize as well as other distinctions. Hesse was only too aware that these attempts at appropriation in both West and East were intended to...

For more than three decades, Hans Blumenberg and Reinhart Koselleck maintained a correspondence that was characterized by mutual affection but also by distance. It shows two academic protagonists discuss the founding of universities and interdisciplinarity in times of university reform – and two sensitive scholars trying to communicate central aspects of their research: conceptual...

Brüdi – this was the family’s nickname for Martin, Hermann Hesse’s youngest son.

When Hermann Hesse left his family in April 1919 to lead an unattached life in Ticino on the southern side of the Alps, his three sons were sent to live with foster families or to a children’s home. A shock especially for Martin, just seven years old. Like Hesse’s first...

Spring 1958: Ingeborg Bachmann – celebrated poet, winner of Literary Prize of Gruppe 47 and cover star of Der Spiegel – is broadcasting the radio play Der gute Gott von...

When asked which contemporary philosopher he considered the most important, Hans Jonas answered more than once: Hans Blumenberg. Conversely, there were only few colleagues Blumenberg respected more than Jonas. Their correspondence, which spans almost 25 years, is a testament to their mutual esteem, but also to occasional tensions, and offers insights into the biographical and historical...

Stefan Zweig, one of the most successful German-language authors, came from a wealthy Jewish family in which, however, Jewish tradition played only a very small role. His correspondence from 1900...

This volume comprising more than 500 letters sets in few months after the begin of World War II. These letters depict in many dramatic episodes the extent to which Hermann Hesse and his German...

It’s not easy being the son of a famous father. More so if that father is often absent and the family breaks apart. This correspondence, containing almost 300 hitherto unpublished letters,...

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.

Paul Celan, the most-interpreted German-speaking poet after 1945, is also the author of an eminent opus of letters. In this edition, it becomes visible as its own...

Over the course of three decades, from 1953 to 1983, jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006) corresponded with one another. The exchange between the former »Crown Jurist of the Third Reich« and the future »most important German historian of the 20th centurry« (DIE ZEIT) not only deals with the main works of the two protagonists but also with...

»Dearest, dearest Christa, how nice that you remain here on this daft planet!«, Sarah Kirsch writes in the autumn of 1988 to her friend who has just recovered from a life-threatening illness. One...