Based on true events, this is a story of intelligent resistance and civic courage in times of inhumanity, then and now.

Award-winning author Erich Hackl draws a vivid picture of Second World War Vienna – and of the fate of people leaving the city, to start new lives in Iran, Australia, China and other places.

How the taciturn Vienna craftsman and passionate mountaineer Reinhold Duschka came to save two Jewish lives during the Nazi reign of terror. How he managed to hide Regina Steinig and her daughter Lucia in his workshop over four years. How the three of them, tied by an invisible rope, survived thanks to good fortune and mutual trust. What happened afterwards. This meticulously researched story develops an incredible undertow, while affecting the reader deeply.

Featured in New Books in German.

A book on friendship to people and loyalty to a utopia, on feeling at home and feeling out of place.

More Happiness in Life contains Erich Hackl’s appreciations of people important to him. He writes about who they were and what they stood for. On the meaning and significance of friendship, resistance, and Heimat. However, it also includes biting and funny writings. Disobedient thank-you speeches. Essays about writers he admires, and about the difficulties of writing. His work from the past 25 years follows a common thread and, against all odds, doesn’t let it go.

The story of the Austrian Rudi Friemel and the Spaniard Marga Ferrer who met during the Spanish Civil War, who were repeatedly separated by events and who were finally able to legalise their union under the most impossible conditions: Rudi has been a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp since 1942, and in 1944 Marga is able to visit him for one day in the death camp in order to marry him. A glimmer of hope or a cruel piece of cynicism on the part of the dictators? In any case, an incredible occurrence that means a lot not only to the bride and groom. It is to have its consequence for Auschwitz. A moving book about hope and despair, the defeats of half a century. A book in which the emphasis is on both love and trust – to the limits of human endurance.

The gripping story of a young gypsy girl born in the year the Nazis came to power in Germany. Adopted by a loving working-class family, Sidonia grows up as a nurtured and protected child in a small, impoverished Austrian town. The times are turbulent and saturated with fear and violence. Everything foreign is perceived as dangerous, and general insecurity turns into hatred. Sidonia looks different than the other children in town, she cannot hide her heritage. As the Nazis gain influence and power, danger mounts for her and her socialist foster parents. They are exposed to increasing pressure until ultimately their very lives are threatened and Sidonia's fate lies in the hands of the townspeople. As a mercilessly sober chronicler of facts, Hackl presents us with historical events that were long suppresssed. Yet beyond the actual individual case the clear intensity of his language evokes the fate of all those who are persecuted for their ethnic origin, political beliefs, or religious background. In the end, no reader can escape the haunting question who has to bear responsibility for injustice that was committed and that still is committed today.

Mendoza – a peaceful provincial town in Argentina at the foot of the Andes. The 8 April 1977 – the last day that Gisela Tenenbaum was seen alive. What happened to her after that date remains a mystery. How does a family continue to come to terms with the fact that their daughter – Gisi – disappeared so many years ago? Was she kidnapped, tortured, murdered? Gisi is gone and yet still present - a situation more painful than if she had died as a child. Erich Hackl has written the story of her family – Austrians of Jewish origin who fled to Argentina in 1939 –, of Gisi's committed struggle against injustice, and her desperate, underground work for a cause that would ultimately be lost.

A family story about three generations – about one hundred years and our present-day. It is a story of injustice and poverty, but also of fidelity, friendship and the hope of happiness. And what a story! It is one of a German-Austrian married couple, Hugo and Juliana Salzmann, whose love hardly stands a chance in times of resistance and exile. It is also the story of their son and how his aunt managed to keep him alive in the direst of circumstances. It is the story of his struggle to retain a close bond to his deceased mother and his futile attempts to win his father's affection and patience. And it is the story of their grandson who – in our present-day – is bullied at his workplace and loses his job when he lets slip one sentence: »My grandma was killed in a concentration camp.« But it is also a collective story ›from our midst‹ that reveals to us what it is to be protective and kind when circumstances seem set to engulf a person.

Haunting stories: The life of a child whose parents have forgotten to love him. A woman reluctant to speak about herself, on the verge of disappearing behind the veil of amnesia. A man guarding an extraordinary secret for the sake of love. A grandfather, knowing that his own children were forced to give up their lives for him, who is searching for his kidnapped grandchild. A revolutionary who continues to rise from the dead. Accounts of the ten commandments of a storyteller, of a land with two scales of justice, of a visit to an extraordinary museum, of how to divide a cube of sugar between ten people. And portraits of authors whose work is too important to be noticed by the literary scene.

A love story that begins at a sickbed: in January 1937, the Austrian Karl Sequens is admitted to hospital in Valencia as part of a transport of wounded volunteers. When he and Herminia Roudière Perpiñá meet it is love at first sight for them both. They get married without delay as if they knew there was not much time left to them. One year later their daughter Rosa María is born, shortly before the defeat of the Spanish republic they lose touch. Herminia flees with the child, first to France and subsequently to Vienna where Karl's sister receives her with bad grace and finally has her evacuated to Bavaria. Herminia hasn't heard from her husband for years when three letters arrive: from Dachau, Lublin and Auschwitz. The study of Love at First Sight paces our era and continent, tying up hope and sorrow, yearning for justice and for happiness. First of all it is the persisting plea for a love into death; an affection that is living on in their daughter and leading in a new love – at a sickbed again. A radical, deeply moving love story, told in a fascinatingly clear and vivid language, shamingly uncontemporary!

›Aurora's Motive‹ ist an electrifying novel of feminism gone mad, based on the true story of Aurora Rodriguez. Born in 1890 into the stifling world of provincial bourgeois Spain, Aurora Rodriguez grew up precocious, virtually self-educated, filled with longings for self-realization and cloudy Nietzschean dreams (gleaned from her father's library) of a world made better by a Superwoman – if not herself, than a daughter. In 1914, after her parents died, she moved to Madrid and gave birth to a daughter, Hildegart, whom she proceeded to raise by herself, with utter devotion and according to her own theories, to be the Valkyrie of the New Era. Hildegart was indeed a prodigy – a thirteen-year-old law student at Madrid's Central University, a brilliant socialist activist who led campaigns for sexual freedom and the creation of the Spanish Republic - until, at the age of 17, she fell under the spell of the notoriously seductive H.G. Wells, who invited her to leave Spain. Torn between the superwoman persona her mother had created for her and her own, more worldly desires, Hildegart begged Aurora to rescue her. And so Aurora did…

On 20 August 1976, during the time of the military dictatorship, the following report appeared in the Uruguayan newspaper 'El Día': In Montevideo yesterday evening a two months old baby was found abandoned by its degenerate mother. The baby was admitted to the city orphanage by order of the court. The mother has not yet been traced. Hackl links the finding of the baby with a young woman called Sara Méndez who fled from Uruguay in 1973 and continued fighting against the regime in Argentina. In June 1976 she gave birth to a child in Buenos Aires, and twenty days later she was abducted by a commando of the Secret Service. She had to leave her son Simón behind - one of thousands of missing persons. Sara's efforts at finding the baby Simón again were unsuccessful for many years, and it was only in the mid-1980s that she came upon the track of an abandoned boy who was probably her son. Her desire for certainty about the boy's identity brought her into conflict with all the other parties involved: the law of the land, the boy's foster parents, and the boy himself. Hackl tells the story in great detail and in clear, poetic language. He does not shrink from calling a spade a spade, he spares neither the victim nor the culprits, he takes sides, and he does not deny his own part in the affair. Yet this gripping and moving story is concerned with more than just this one specific case and reminds us of a whole generation of young men and women who were set on changing the world two decades ago. The author asks, softly, what became of them and their dreams, what was neglected and what still remains to be done, and what happens to those actively dedicated to the ideal of justice for everyone. He asks, too, where the stories end and life begins, and above all he reminds us of man's power to retain his dignity and his ability to pass on his experiences.