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. 

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?

A piece of intellectual autobiography by a writer who has delved deeply into the crucial ideologies and beliefs of the 20th century. This volume of essays provides insights into the workshop, self-interpretation and ideas of an independent spirit who ascribes a far higher value to the binding nature of art than that with which we are generally familiar today.

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.

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.

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?

Professor Bodewig wanted to discover new territory, and it seemed as though his wish might just be fulfilled. Bodewig, a political scientist at Dahlem University, has unexpectedly inherited a property in Vienna. He asks his wife to take a look at the house and to get the renovations underway. Although it is highly unlikely that he will be able to transfer his job, he seems to be considering a move to Vienna. His apartment in Berlin is almost empty, the furniture in storage, the house in Vienna is ready – but still Bodewig does not arrive. Something seems to prevent him from leaving his old lodgings. Van der Velde promised to marry Sybille. They have been together for so long now, but the computer specialist keeps delaying this last formality. Instead he wants Sybille to fly with him to Leptis Magna in Libya, to see the famous ruins. Meanwhile he keeps disappearing, with ever-increasing haste, on secret journeys of his own. Sybille has no idea what he is up to, but does get one little hint: when he comes home, she finds fine, red sand trickling out of his suitcase. Two masterful novellas about human crises and grand delusions, about the balance between clinging to the known and the loss of the self, about the fear of involvement and the maelstrom of self-disintegration. Novellas of irritating beauty and almost metaphysical transparency.

»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.