The First World War was an industrialized mass war. Yet mixed into the rumble of artillery weapons and the rattling of machine guns one could hear the pounding of hoofs, dogs barking and the soft wing-beats of messenger pigeons. Millions of mounts, pack animals and drafts were vital for the locomotion of humans and material…

2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two. Despite a persistent effort to reprocess the deadliest conflict in human history, one important chapter of the post-war period still receives little attention: the fate of about 450,000 children of war, who were conceived through rape, love affairs and relationships between German women…

Since the early 70s, the IRA admitted women to join their organisation. Marian (17) and Dolours (21) Price were the first of fifty to take the oath of the IRA, thus binding themselves to an underground life. Their choices in life were similar to that of all members of the IRA: prison or death. Most…

From Otto Normalverbraucher (»Joe Everybody«) to 007-badguy Auric Goldfinger, from child-killer Schrott in »It Happened in Broad Daylight« to Preußler’s »Räuber Hotzenplotz«: Gert Fröbe was one of the few international stars to come from Germany. Though throughout his life he was unhappy about having to play the villain, he was a darling of the public,…

Going down is always easier. That’s what Ferdinand and his three friends have noticed – four friends living in a dump of a house in a small Bavarian town, who spend their days boozing and burglarizing when not philosophizing about their modern refusal-to-work ethic. Apart from alcohol and an occasional little swindle, they have nothing…

Jörg Juretzka’s atmosphere-laden urban crime stories set in the Ruhr are gritty and full of fantastic heroes – like the master of slowness in his first book »Tingle«, who mistakenly winds up in a madhouse as a beastly murderer, or the wonderful slot-machine king who has one vice too many with his penchant for cocaine…

Kristof Kryszinski likes to take it easy. He can’t always remember the last couple of beers from the night before. He drives an antique Carina and often needs to stop by the junkyard to replace the parts that have fallen off. He grudgingly feeds a despotic cat. And he’s also a private detective, who keeps…

»It’s pointless for me to excuse myself for not recognizing Feri K. when he suddenly came my way on Wednesday, September 26, at the corner of Oktogon and Andrásy Street,where Savoy Restaurant used to be and where Burger King now offers its modest fare.« Robert Singer, deputy director of an »Institute for Jugenstil« in Vienna,…

Time, March 1913. Place, at Salzburg. The King Otto I of Albania is admitted to a lunatic asylum. The tale begins in Constantinople in October 1912, on the eve of the First Balkan War, when Albania declared itself independent after 400 years of Ottoman occupation. As chance would have it, Otto Witte – actor, salon-artiste…

Berlin, start of the 1980s: Rick Jankowski must go underground. With a grazing shot on the arm, he lands in the apartment of his old friend Benjamin and confides in him: he recounts the nature of his deep love for Lilli and the business dealings that his seedy boss Werner Karl Lausen ensnared him in.…

Twelve children disappear mysteriously in a radius of one hundred kilometers: abducted and kidnapped, apparently without a motive. The children have nothing in common that would hint at a perpetrator. There seems to be nothing that links them at all. One year later the first child corpse turns up, just a few days after the…

Latin America is home to macho men, or so goes the stereotype. But there’s nowhere else where women work their way with more success into supposedly male domains than in those 19 countries. Before Margaret Thatcher became Europe’s fi rst female prime minister in 1979, Argentina had already been ruled for two years by a…

The unbelievable life of impostor Heinrich Kieber who unhinged the financial world. It was the worst imaginable catastrophe for the discreet Liechtenstein trustees and their international clientele: Heinrich Kieber, an employee of the Princely Trust Company LGT, illegally copied the firm’s entire client database and sold the stolen data to the German intelligence agency BND…

Enough is enough. Kryszinksi has shut down his investigative agency and taken over the TaxiBar, a 24-hour bar in Eppinghofen, Mulheim’s ill-famed train station district. Yet what he really wants is a trip, an endlessly long trip. His portal for this trip is in a package that he found on a deserted Atlantic beach and…

The list of assaults, murders and attacks by the extreme right in Germany is a long one. But until now things were swept under the carpet. And a well-established cliché on the subject goes: at most, Neo-Nazis terrorize the back country of eastern Germany. The NSU (National Socialist Underground) and the ten murders that are…

Budapest 1955/56: The twelve-year-old Robi Singer, who was born in a Budapest shelter during a nightly bombing raid, was not circumcised according to Jewish tradition. The symbolic ritual is set to take place shortly before his Bar Mitzva. Robi is disquieted by this fateful day, but he does not manage to circumvent the little procedure.…

A mother and her two teenage children sit at the dinner table. In the middle stands a large pot of cooked mussels. Why has the father not returned home? As the evening wears on, we glimpse the issues that are tearing this family apart. A few hours are enough to tear a carefully balanced nuclear…

The action opens in 1928, when Ruth and Maria meet in Café Josty on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin on the same day that Olga has freed her lover and comrade Otto Braun from prison armed with an unloaded pistol. They discuss her defi ance (her Frech heit) somewhat enviously, and Ruth suggests founding a society…

Whether you look at the success of Pirate Party, the rekindled anti-atomic movement or the protest against »Stuttgart 21« (a giant construction project in the heart of the city) – more and more people in Germany and other places in the world are expressing their discontent with politics and the established parties. We’ve experienced stably…

It’s festering. The crisis is declared to be over, when really it’s just getting started again. Millions of people are afraid of the future. A tiny minority possesses billions. The middle class is in being torn apart. Fear and poverty cause civic consensus to crumble. Racism and ecological destruction rise. Loss of trust, panicked reforms,…