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.

First published in 1963, Andersch's second volume of short stories depicts human beings at the threshold between a burdensome past and the better future they have been hoping for. Andersch's commitment to a type of psychological and social realism which stands in direct opposition to attempts of the ›nouveau roman‹.

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.

When the opportunity arose at last, in the idyllic Italian countryside on the day of the Normandy landings in 1944 and until he was safely taken POW by the advancing American army, Andersch found himself in a wilderness, a place of freedom. The cherries he plucked from a tree were the cherries of freedom, and the taste of them was one Andersch had not known for all of the years of the Third Reich: the taste of freedom.

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.