With a startling sense of immediacy, this tense and gripping novel whirls the reader into the vortex of up-to-date life in cosmopolitan Europe. It is a tale of personal flight. Franziska, a beautiful German woman, impulsively escapes from an unpleasant marriage and takes a train to Venice. There, in the bleak wintertime atmosphere of this fabulous city, she is unwittingly drawn into the cross-currents of a dangerous struggle whose source lies in the turbulence of war and international intrigue … Suspense, murder, and unexpected fulfillment mark the climax of this powerful and compelling story. In skillfully unfolding the fates of his characters caught in the complexities of their age, Alfred Andersch eloquently records a pattern of life in Europe today.

The year is 1944; the place, Winterspelt, a small village on the Belgian border which is also the German front line. To everyone involved, Germans and Americans alike, it is obvious that Germany has unofficially lost the war. Thus communication between the two sides, although not yet realised, begins to seem a distinct possibility. The commander of the German troops grows obsessed with the idea of surrendering his battalion to the Americans. His symbolic act, one that speaks for life amidst the machinery of death, is the crucial issue of this powerful story, and the help and hindrances which he encounters in his quest compose a geography of human nature. Andersch creates a sympathetic, compassionate view of people at war coming to terms with their suffering and themselves.

Andersch's third collection of short stories, published in 1971, shows the author at the height of his aesthetic possibilities. Apart from discontinuous and fragmentary narrative forms as well as literary montage, the volume notably features conventionally narrated autobiographical stories, or, in other words, fictionalisations of the author's own life.

A boy dreaming of Huckleberry Finn, a mortally ill Pastor, a disillusioned Communist, a young Jewish girl running for her life - meet in a half-derelict Baltic fishing village and are drawn into a daring plan of escape from Nazi Germany. At the center of their plan is a small statue in the Pastor's church, a statue which is to be confiscated because it is politically dangerous, a statue so beautiful and powerful that it welds together the strangely assorted band of refugees. This unusual novel - unusual in both form and content - is a masterpiece of condensed dramatic writing. Andersch investigates the many needs for flight and the strange loyalties which sometimes make escape impossible.

Alfred Andersch and Max Frisch met one another for the first time in 1957, in the legendary Café Odeon in Zurich. In his role as a radio editor, Andersch asks Frisch, three years his senior, for the most daring and shocking extract possible from his recently completed novel ›Homo Faber‹. Shortly after that, Frisch writes to him for the first time. At the beginning of the sixties, when Frisch is living in Rome with Ingeborg Bachmann after having left his family, their correspondence intensifies. In 1965, Frisch relocates with his new, younger lover Marianne Oellers, his future wife, to Berzona in Ticino, where the Anderschs' owned a house from 1958 onwards. Frisch finds himself in illustrious company: as well as Alfred Andersch, Golo Mann and the designer and typographer Jan Tschichold live in the small mountain village too. They would go hiking together and meet in food stores for a good chat. But the idyll did not last long, for the tensions between the two pugnacious spirits Frisch and Andersch increased until the latter temporarily broke off all contact.

An eighth grade Latin lesson at a Gymnasium in the late 1920s: What begins as an ordinary class for student Franz Kien takes a sudden turn when headmaster Himmler enters the classroom, turning the lesson into a humiliating ordeal for Franz. In this chillingly topical text, Andersch shows how the darkest chapter of German history began to unfold in classrooms.

Efraim, a German Jew by birth, is sent as an adolescent to live with his wealthy uncle in England. In 1962 he returns to Berlin for the first time in twenty-seven years; his assignment to trace the abandoned, illegitimate daughter of his corpulent empolyer. Appalled by a city whose present decencies only serve to remind him of his past atrocities, and stimulated by his affair with a Maoist actress, Efraim, in search of identity and salvation, begins his fragmented autobiography…

Above all, Alfred Andersch achieved literary fame as a storyteller: it was as a storyteller that he celebrated his greatest success, both with his readers and the critics, it was as a storyteller that he was awarded, and as a storyteller that he secured his place in the history of German post-war literature. This new volume collects the best of his realistic and fantastical stories – stories that contain entire life stories, ghost stories, snapshots in the tradition of the American short story, political stories, family stories – prose pieces in which Andersch devotes himself again and again to new literary forms.