Hermann Langbein was allowed to know and see extraordinary things forbidden to other Auschwitz inmates. Interned at Auschwitz in 1942 and classified as a non-Jewish political prisoner, he was assigned as clerk to the chief SS physician of the extermination camp complex, which gave him access to documents, conversations, and actions that would have remained unknown to history were it not for his witness and his subsequent research. Also a member of the Auschwitz resistance, Langbein sometimes found himself in a position to influence events, though at his peril.People in Auschwitz is very different from other works on the most infamous of Nazi annihilation centers. Langbein's account is a scrupulously scholarly achievement intertwining his own experiences with quotations from other inmates, SS guards and administrators, civilian industry and military personnel, and official documents. Whether his recounting deals with captors or inmates, Langbein analyzes the events and their context objectively, in an unemotional style, rendering a narrative that is unique in the history of the Holocaust. This monumental book helps us comprehend what has so tenaciously challenged understanding.

The great Jewish scholar shares his insights into philosopher Walter Benjamin, a childhood friend who committed suicide in 1940. Reprint. (view table of contents)

This text contains two of Walter Benjamin's essays, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', and 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', as well as others on the art of translation, Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust, and book collecting.

Product Description: Karl Kraus (1874-1936) is widely regarded as one of the most talented and influential satirists of the twentieth century. He was an enormously productive writer of poetry, critical essays, and aphorisms, and spent the bulk of his life in Vienna...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: "Inspiring and informative, this book fills large gaps in what we know about resistance in the concentration camps." Kirkus Reviews Finally in paperback, in this major and comprehensive work, hailed by Le Monde as a "monumental study," Hermann Langbein shatters the myth that all prisoners of concentration camps, during World War II, passively let themselves be slaughtered...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays and translations reflects the Viennese-born author-translator's Austrian-Jewish heritage as well as representing his broad involvement as a cultural mediator between his native and adopted countries. The essays - on Herzl, Zweig, Kraus, Kafka, Werfel, Waldinger, Csokor, Trakl, and the winegarden songs of Vienna - highlight the great Jewish contribution to Austrian culture, and they are supplemented and illuminated by the short prose of Zweig, Herzl, Beer-Hofmann, Polgar, Buber, and others...read more

Product Description: Acclaimed as one of the most vivid and evocative autobiographies of the century, Manes Sperber's trilogy All Our Yesterdays concludes in this final volume. Through the eyes of this eminent European intellectual and activist, we witness the years 1934-1984 including hostility between Croats and Serbs in Yugoslavia, the abortive workers' uprising in Vienna, and Stalin's show trials...read more

Product Description: Dieser Sammelband enthält neun der Vorträge, die Farau in den vierziger, fünfziger und sechziger Jahren an zahlreichen amerikanischen Hochschulen und Instituten hielt sowie einen Auszug aus seinem Theaterstück über Grillparzer...read more

Product Description: The Unheeded Warning richly portrays the turbulent interwar period in Vienna and Berlin through the eyes of one of the century's foremost intellectuals and activists. Psychologist, novelist, essayist, and revolutionary, Manes Sperber begins his story in Vienna when he was thirteen years old and concludes the book--which is the second volume of his three-volume autobiography, All Our Yesterdays--with a gripping account of his imprisonment and release by the Germans in Berlin...read more