The second installment in the darkly intelligent series that The Independent called “As noir as they get.” 1927, Breslau, Poland: Two elaborate and sadistic murders are discovered within days of each other. The body of an unknown musician, bound and gagged, is found behind a false wall in a shoemaker’s workshop. The victim had been sealed in alive. Elsewhere in the city, the horrifically mutilated body of a locksmith is found. Next to each victim is a torn-out calendar page, with the day of the death marked in blood. Nothing else seems to connect the cases. It falls to Criminal Councillor Eberhard Mock to solve the case, the mystery taking him still further into the Breslau underworld he knows only too well. Meanwhile, his hard-drinking nocturnal habits soon threaten his volatile marriage, and prompt some strange behavior from his wife ... and before long, Mock and his team will be investigating not only two of the grisliest murders in the city’s history, but the councillor’s own wife.
“Phantoms of Breslau is a cynical, moody thriller which solidifies Krajewski’s position as a distinctive voice in contemporary European fiction.” —Irish Examiner Breslau, 1919: The hideously battered, naked bodies of four sailors are discovered on an island in the River Oder. When Criminal Assistant Eberhard Mock, back from the war, arrives at the scene to investigate, he finds an enigmatic note addressed to him insisting that he admit to past mistakes and become a believer. As he endeavors to piece together the elements of the brutal crime, Mock combs the brothels and drinking dens of the then still-German city of Breslau and is drawn into an insidious game: it seems that anyone he questions during the course of the investigation is destined to become the next victim. Meanwhile, Mock uncovers a secret society that has the Criminal Assistant himself clearly in its sights. Dark, sophisticated, and uncompromising, the distinctive Breslau series has already received broad critical acclaim. Phantoms of Breslau confirms Eberhard Mock as one of the most outrageous and original detectives in crime fiction.
This is a study of how the Jewish community of Breslau--the third largest and one of the most affluent in Germany--coped with Nazi persecution. Ascher has included the experiences of his immediate family, although the book is based mainly on archival sources, numerous personal reminiscences, as well as publications by the Jewish community in the 1930s. It is the first comprehensive study of a local Jewish community in Germany under Nazi rule. Until the very end, the Breslau Jews maintained a stance of defiance and sought to persevere as a cohesive group with its own institutions. They categorically denied the Nazi claim that they were not genuine Germans, but at the same time they also refused to abandon their Jewish heritage. They created a new school for the children evicted from public schools, established a variety of new cultural institutions, placed new emphasis on religious observance, maintained the Jewish hospital against all odds, and, perhaps most remarkably, increased the range of welfare services, which were desperately needed as more and more of their number lost their livelihood. In short, the Jews of Breslau refused to abandon either their institutions or the values that they had nurtured for decades. In the end, it was of no avail as the Nazis used their overwhelming power to liquidate the community by force.
The fourth volume in the Inspector Eberhard Mock Quintet, the series called "As Noir as it gets" by the The Independent. When Abwehr Captain Eberhard Mock is called from his New Year's Eve revelries to attend a particularly grisly crime scene, his notoriously robust stomach is turned. A young girl—and suspected spy—who arrived by train from France just days before, has been found dead in her hotel room, the flesh torn from her cheek by her assailant's teeth. Ill at ease with the increasingly open integration of S.S., Gestapo and police, Mock is partially relieved to be assigned to liaise with officers in Lvov, Poland, where a series of similar crimes—as yet unsolved—cast a long shadow over the town. In Lvov he joins the ongoing investigation conducted by Commissioner Popielksi, a fellow classicist who relies on a highly unorthodox method of deduction. Meanwhile, Popielski is worried by the behaviour of his only daughter, Rita. Her head has been turned by her charismatic drama teacher, and now, unbeknownst to her father, she has started receiving letters from an ardent secret admirer. Eberhard Mock—older, a little wiser, but still a libertine at heart and equally at home in the underworld as in the ranks of authority—once again confirms his position as the most outrageous and unpredictable detective in crime fiction.
In early 1945, the Red Army plunged into the Third Reich from the east, rolling up territory and crushing virtually everything in its path, with one exception: the city of Breslau, which Hitler had declared a fortress-city, to be defended to the death. This book examines in detail the notorious four-month siege of Breslau. • The first full-length English-language account of the bloody siege • Chronicles the bitter struggle as the Red Army encircled Breslau and eventually pillaged the city, taking savage retribution on the survivors • Details the brutal methods used by the city's Nazi leaders to keep German troops fighting and maintain order
Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.
A true life Water for Elephants, Queen of the Air brings the circus world to life through the gorgeously written, true story of renowned trapeze artist and circus performer Leitzel, Queen of the Air, the most famous woman in the world at the turn of the 20th century, and her star-crossed love affair with Alfredo Codona, of the famous Flying Codona Brothers. Like today's Beyonce, Madonna, and Cher, she was known to her vast public by just one name, Leitzel. There may have been some regions on earth where her name was not a household expression, but if so, they were likely on polar ice caps or in the darkest, deepest jungles. Leitzel was born into Dickensian circumstances, and became a princess and then a queen. She was not much bigger than a good size fairy, just four-foot-ten and less than 100 pounds. In the first part of the 20th century, she presided over a sawdust fiefdom of never-ending magic. She was the biggest star ever of the biggest circus ever, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, The Greatest Show on Earth. In her life, Leitzel had many suitors (and three husbands), but only one man ever fully captured her heart. He was the handsome Alfredo Codona, the greatest trapeze flyer that had ever lived, the only one in his time who, night after night, executed the deadliest of all big-top feats, The Triple--three somersaults in midair while traveling at 60 m.p.h. The Triple, the salto mortale, as the Italians called it, took the lives of more daredevils than any other circus stunt.
The most famous battles of one of World War II's most legendary commanders Told largely from Rommel's perspective, using his papers and letters In a series of battles marked by daring raids and quick-armored thrusts against a numerically superior enemy, Erwin Rommel, the notorious Desert Fox, and his Afrika Korps waged one of World War II's toughest campaigns in the North African desert in 1942. The Axis campaign climaxed in June with the recapture of Tobruk, a triumph that netted 33,000 prisoners and earned Rommel a field marshal's baton. By fall, however, after setbacks at Alam Halfa and the 2 battles of El Alamein, the Afrika Korps teetered on the brink of defeat, which would come in Tunisia 6 months later.
"Christoph Hein's novel tells Bernhard Haber's story across nearly fifty years, chronicling his remarkable rise from victimized outsider to Guldenberg's most prominent burgher. Recounted in the voices of five people who had some part in Haber's life - a schoolmate, a girlfriend, a sister-in-law, an accomplice in smuggling people to the West, and a local business associate - a collective portrait emerges of a whole town roiled by political turmoil, of a society where decency is always stained with cynicism." "For Bernhard, though, what began as a geographic dislocation evolves into a personal quest: the thirst for vengeance yields to the deeper need for a home, and settling down proves more important than settling grudges. As the socialist state gives way to reunification and the capitalism of the 1990s, Hein's multivoiced narration charts the transformation not just of one man but of an entire nation struggling to leave history behind and claim a home."--BOOK JACKET.
