In search of beauty, a man embarks on a journey through the centuries, discovering their horrors. Another man loses himself in love, yet encounters only its impossibility. And a third is led to gaze into the abyss by the eschatological question of ›the last things‹. Hartmut Lange manages to comprehend our troubles in a way almost no other contemporary writer can; to distil them into words; and to simultaneously get right to the heart of the matter in a way thatʼs simply inescapable.

Really, Müller-Lengsfeldt, an art teacher from Berlin, would like to concentrate exclusively on Ancient Rome and the work of Johann Winckelmann, the famous researcher into Antiquity. Unfortunately, however, an attractive female travel guide called Regina Ziegler is tenaciously pursued by Müller-Lengsfeldt's rival, Schmeer, and an ominous peregrine falcon keeps on appearing, as baffling and enigmatic as the nocturnal activities outside his hotel room. And through it all is the mystery of the figure around whom his thoughts unceasingly revolve: why did Winckelmann leave the city of his dreams in such a hurry in April 1768? Was his hurried departure connected with his gruesome murder two months later in Trieste? The more Müller-Lengsfeldt ponders on Winckel-mann - a contradictory figure with a mysterious double life - and his state of mind, the more restless and confused he becomes. He sets out to follow his role model on a journey into the unknown whose destination is as doubtful as the possibility of return.

On the occasion of Hartmut Lange's 65th birthday on 31 March 2002, Diogenes published his collected novellas, which established him as an author of international renown.

The latest project of successful novelist Matthias Bamberg has been met with astonishment. His new book is to be called ›The Wanderer‹ – and where it will lead him is anybody's guess. Gradually, however, light is shed on certain events that are unsettling Bamberg. His wife Anita appears to be having an affair and moves out of the apartment they share. So Bamberg books a flight to Cape Town, a bewildering and foreign world, where he suspects he will find Anita and her lover. ›The Wanderer‹ is a story of disturbance, in which reality begins to evaporate and the world of appearances starts to solidify into substance – all the while skilfully held in suspenseful balance by the author.

The disaster begins when Berghoff, the first violin of the quartet of the same name, decides to add Schönberg's String Quartet No. 4, op. 37, to the quartet's repertoire. Schönberg's composition strikes him as being the music of a big-city neurotic – like a mirror in which he slowly starts to recognise himself. He gradually loses his self-confidence, and then his wife tells him that she is taking their daughters away, against his will, on a holiday that seems never-ending. One day he finds a valuable violin in his deserted Berlin apartment, put there by some unknown person – a delightful windfall which he plays at the rehearsals of the Schönberg Quartet. The rehearsals become more and more intensive and Berghoff's behaviour increasingly neurotic. He refuses to accept the fact that someone has long since taken the bow out of his hand. A disturbing drama of jealousy runs its course.

On existential states of mind, in uniquely condensed form.

One of the last great masters of the novella writes about the magical power of gathering shadows.

With an autobiographical text on deeply formative childhood experiences.

»Love is not an opportunity for freedom; it happens out of necessity,« thinks a woman who realizes her husband has left her.
Darkly luminous yet crystal clear sentences like this one have made Hartmut Lange’s prose famous.
Four novellas, complemented by an autobiographical piece, with which Hartmut Lange tells us about the formative experiences for his life and his writing: Christmas 1944 in Naßwerder, the horrors of forced evacuation, the death of his father and later his brother.

»It was an inkling of how our lives would lack presuppositions, once we could no longer cite the protective hand above us.«
Hartmut Lange

Hartmut Lange’s novellas present crises and sensitivities in clear, dense prose and are unique in German contemporary literature. They deal with the focal points of life: love – fear – death.

The Prorer Wiek is a bay on the island of Rugen, where the coastal resort of Binz is located, which is famed for its sophistication. And that glamorous history makes it an impressive backdrop for five novellas of unexpected encounters, disappointments and emotional crises.

Five more novellas are set in Rome, a very different but no less intense setting for life’s ultimate questions. And even the ›eternal city‹ – how invulnerable is it really to transience, the deepest human humiliation?

Ten precipitous novellas of melancholy beauty about what once was and what still thrives, about famous pictures, philosophical consolation and the crutch of common sense. And above all about the question: what endures?

Hartmut Lange’s first novella collection founded his international reputation as a writer.

Novellas about the state of those unhappy individuals for whom consciousness was a particular doom. Novellas about Nietzsche’s insanity, the Goebbels children, the mysterious suicide of Kleist and Henriette Vogel, the nihilist Alfred Seidel, who ended his life in a psychiatric hospital at the age of twenty-nine, and about a Jewish woman who goes walking with an SS man, who will become her murderer.

Lake Hundekehle: She had always been elusive, and her disappearance made her even more mysterious – Alima, the oriental girl, with whom Wernigerode imagined living together for two years.
The Therapist: If the citizens of Berlin only knew ›the extent of the mysterious wilderness‹ right on their doorstep – Lake Halen, for example.
The Insult: Death scene in Hamlet – Sennheiser's performance or the sudden need to survive a deadly role. Berlin lakes, secretive waters with an unimagined pull; the perfect place to disappear – or to make someone disappear. Their counterpart, the floodlit public: a theatre stage acts as the venue for an artistically orchestrated departure.

Three novellas which have one thing in common: They describe the quest for happiness above the abyss of the finite. In the year of 1948, a young man was murdered near a summer house settlement in Berlin; the culprit was never caught. The brother of the murder victim, by now sixty years older, has all but forgotten him – until one day a man turns up who persistently claims to be the murderer. He says he must atone for his deed and wants the victim's brother to help him in his mission. A historian is fascinated by mystic Hildegard von Bingen, especially her antiphons.When he becomes seriously ill, he must decide where he belongs: in the realm of the past or with his partner, a cardiologist who is used to extending life at all costs. The divorced assistant master with a predilection for his own sex seems as forlorn as the beautiful Mathilde from the Belle Epoque who, unnoticed and walled up, has been left on her pedestal above a car repair shop. His deep yearning revolves around this female figure made of plaster.

Hartmut Lange’s stories are set in Munich, in a small town near Hamburg, on the Baltic Sea coast, and on the raw north-west coast of England. And again and again in Berlin, where past and present penetrate in a particularly palpable way. Eight stories which are as bright as day and mysteriously condensed, which depict and artfully capture precarious states of mind: deceptive promises of happiness, unfulfillable longing, the need of lonely people, the encounter with evil, the fear of failing.

A viral plague that could destroy humanity: but isn’t it already under threat from a far worse enemy? What is it that audiences admire about seeing a consumptive depicted on the operatic stage, or an absinth-drinker in a museum? What happens when nature attacks a monument that humanity has erected to itself? A book about parting, and the experience of wounds that refuse to heal – and about the stumbling stones in our own minds. 

The Museum of German History in Berlin – a ›warehouse full of rubbish‹? Or a place that makes history visible? One thing is for sure, it's a place of baffling apparitions. A museum employee leaves under unusual circumstances. A visitor cannot find the exit. A dark corridor leads to a vanished world. A Stasi officer guards his own past. The restless ghost of Adolf Hitler wanders through the rooms. A mother and her child search for heaven. Rodin's The Thinker is put to the question. A museum can be enriched a great deal by literature. In this novel, the imaginary world transcends the real one, and the seven episodes of this book show just how thrilling, moving, illuminating and uncanny it can be. Whoever reads it will not ever be able to look at a museum in the same way again. Hartmut Lange's prose overcomes space and time, bringing to life not only the shadows which can be found in such a place, but also the great mysterious questions of our very existence.

Five novellas that play out in the south west of Berlin, and through which the Teltow Canal winds its way like a red thread, with its black crows, secluded villas and impenetrable forests. Above it, the sky is suddenly sealed off by an ash cloud. After his wife's unexpected death, a man gives up everything that connects him to the past. But what can he cling to now? – An established politician suddenly becomes convinced that a crow is sitting on the back seat of his car like a crouching shadow. – A journalist is summoned to cold and damp London for a job and hopes his wife will follow him. But when an Icelandic volcano seals off the skies with its ash cloud, his imagination runs wild. – A man follows mysterious sounds of cello music in the woods and finds a famous cellist, but unfortunately she has already been dead for twenty-five years. – The fifth novella is about a hotel consultant, married and more and more away on business. Why can his wife, who loves him, only keep him with her as a shadow?

»Truth lies in disappearance«, a puzzling sentence which runs through the book like a leitmotif and poses many questions. Corinna Mühlbauer, the reticent girlfriend of the renowned Berlin structural engineer Kippenberger, throws doubt not only on her relationship with Kippenberger but also on the marriage of their friends, a dentist couple called Dahlhaus. How does she do it? How does she, who is so often silent and apparently uninvolved, manage to irritate the people around her and plunge them into despair? She is there one minute and gone the next, vanished as if into thin air. The truth lies in disappearance… It is not clear why Corinna suddenly refuses to marry Kippenberger, why she always takes the same route to the Grunewald lake, and why the moon over the lake is visible in the south-east at first, and then in the north-west. The perspectives are confused, nothing is in its right place. The marriage carousel starts slowly to revolve, until Corinna finds the man who she believes understands her »different kind of happiness«. In this mysterious subtle book, Hartmut Lange penetrates spaces far beyond the hectic life of the Berlin metropolis. In brilliantly dense and laconic language, he describes people willing to embark on tortuous paths in their search for happiness.