Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman studying law in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her and her mother into a ghetto, issuing them papers branded with a J. Soon Edith was taken away to a labour camp and when she returned home after months away she found her mother had been deported. Her boyfriend, Pepi, proved too terrified to help her, but a Christian friend was not. Using the woman's identity papers, she fled to Munich. There she met Werner Vetter, a Nazi party member who fell in love with her and, despite her protests and even her eventual confession that she was Jewish, he married her and kept her identity secret.

Ruth Maier was born into a middle-class Jewish family in interwar Vienna. Following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, the world of the substantial Viennese Jewish community crumbled. In early 1939, her sister having left for England, Ruth emigrated to Norway and lived with a family in Lillestrom, about thirty miles from Oslo. Although she loved many things about her new country and its people, Ruth's relationship with her hosts soon turned stale, then sour. Ruth became increasingly isolated in Norway until she met a soul mate, Gunvor Hofmo, who was to become a celebrated poet. Norway itself became a Nazi conquest in April 1940, and Ruth's attempts to join the rest of her family - now in Britain - became ever more urgent. She never left Norway, and in November 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was exterminated on arrival. She had just turned twenty-two. Ruth Maier kept a diary from 1934 until just before she was murdered. Despite being only in her teens she shows a sophisticated understanding of the political forces shaping central Europe as well as extraordinary prescience. The book is much more than just historical documentation, however. In a lucid yet highly lyrical style, with an incisive talent for narrative and a sharp wit, Ruth explores universal themes of isolation, identity, friendship, love, sexuality, desire, morality, justice and sacrifice. Most of all, however, she seeks what it means to be a human being. Published only recently for the first time in Norway, Ruth Maier's Diary is one of the most moving testimonies to emerge from this dark period of European history

After nine years of separation from his native country because of the First World War, Louis finally sets foot in Austria and meets the woman he had been in love with and who had promised to wait for him. This novel is a poignant examination of the angst of nostalgia and the fragility of love.

First extensive selection of Freud’s correspondence contains 315 letters written from 1873 to 1939. Addressed to Einstein, Thomas Mann, Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells, Maria Montessori, Carl Jung, Romain Rolland, many others. Over one third are love letters to Martha Bernays. Highly readable, nontechnical. Bibliography. Footnotes. Translated by Tania and James Stern. 15 halftones.

Looks at such major aspects of the author's life as family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness, and despair, and argues that, when reinserted in Kafka's letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of "sainthood" frequently attached to him.

On the eve of World War II, a young Englishwoman takes a job as housemother in a boarding school in Austria. She falls in love with the groundsman who is in reality a Czech composer. The arrival of the Nazis leads to drama, the lovers are separated but they will reunite. By the author of Madensky Square.

Set in the early 1900s, Viennese Romance tells the story of Michael Rost, an eighteen-year-old Jewish youth who travels to Vienna, hungry for experience. There, he forms passing relationships with everyone who crosses his path - prostitutes, revolutionaries, paupers, army officers, and rich men alike. With a foreword that explains how this lost novel came to light, Viennese Romance is a seminal work that explores the conflicts faced by many Jewish intellectuals in early-twentieth-century Europe. A compelling portrait of a decadent society, it also lays bare the obsessive-destructive nature of love.

The films of Fritz Lang depict an entrapping, claustrophobic world in which people are controlled by larger forces. His overriding theme is the struggle against fate and against the traits of human nature that doom us. His life and work spanned six decades of film history-from the silent era through the golden age of German Expressionism of the 1920s and the classic studio system in Hollywood to the rise of the international co-production. In Hollywood he worked for every major studio except Disney. He made blockbusters, modest B movies, and everything in between. Among his films are classics of German cinema-including Metropolis and M . In America he made some of the most notable crime movies ( Fury ), noir films ( The Big Heat ), and Westerns ( The Return of Frank James ) of the studio era. Despite the different time periods, nations, and genres in which he worked, his films remain stylistically consistent. Lang (1890-1976), a notoriously difficult interviewee, granted relatively few interviews apart from short publicity exchanges in the promotion of his films. Fully aware of his public persona, he was a canny self-promoter who carefully constructed half-truths and myths about himself. This fascinating collection covers his conversations about his life and his works over a period of forty years. They reveal how cinema for Lang was an intensely personal art. "For me," he said, "cinema is a vice. I love it intimately. I've often written that it is the art form of our century."

Kurt Janisch is an ambitious, but frustrated country policeman. Things are not going right in his life - at least not fast enough. But a country policeman gets talking to a lot of people in the line of duty - particularly women. Lonely, middle-aged women, women with a bit of property perhaps...Matters go from bad to worse: for Kurt Janisch, for the women who fall for him. Someone sees too much, knows too much. Soon there's a body in a lake and a murderer to be caught. A thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, "Greed" is Elfriede Jelinek's most accessible novel since "The Piano Teacher". But, as always, Jelinek gives the reader a lot more to think about: the ecological costs of affluence, the inescapable burden and inadequacy of our everyday words, the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, the impossibility of life without relationships. A meditative reflection on ageing, "Greed" is another chapter in Jelinek's chronicling of her love/hate relationship with Austria.

"Captured in a beautiful package, including more than fifty color photographs, The Last Waltz tells the intriguing story of of the Viennese Strauss family known for producing some of the best known, best loved music of the nineteenth century. Johann and Josef Strauss, the Waltz Kings, composed hundreds of instantly recognizable and enduring melodies, including The Blue Danube Waltz, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Voices of Spring and The Radetzky March. Their iconic music has been featured on the scores of nearly a thousand films. Yet despite their success, this was a family riven with tension, feuds and jealousy, living in a country that was undergoing seismic upheaval. Through the personal and political chaos, the Strauss family continued to compose music to which the Viennese -- anxious to forget their troubles -- could dance and drank champagne, even as their country hurtled towards oblivion at the hands of the First World War. Classical music expert and radio host John Suchet skillfully portrays this gripping story, capturing the family dramas, the tensions, triumphs and disasters against the turbulent backdrop of Austria in the nineteenth century, from revolution to regicide." --

"I had to do something to escape Hitler's clutches," writes Esti Freud. Yet she waits with her then-16-year-old daughter, Sophie in Paris, until German canons can be heard in the distance, before deciding to escape by bicycle across France as Sophie keeps looking back to see whether German tanks will overtake them. Both women survive by sheer miracle and, in their own ways, come to feel a need to keep a personal record of those tumultuous times. In a memoir written at age 79, Esti Freud, daughter-in-law of Sigmund Freud and wife of his oldest son Martin, looks back on her life that began before the 20th century, was lived on three continents, and stretched through two world wars and the Holocaust. Twenty years after her mother's death, daughter Sophie turned to Esti's memoir as a scaffold for this book, expanding it through family letters and archival material. Out of these documents the author has created a fascinating, many-voiced mosaic--the story of a famous family and of a century seen through the eyes of many characters. Indomitable Esti was not an easy person to love. While she establishes herself professionally three times, in three different languages, her troubled family relationships leave her lonely, often deeply unhappy. Sophie confides that Esti died without son or daughter at her side. This work gives an insider's, in-law view of the family Freud, its foundations, and flaws. The relationship between Esti, daughter of a wealthy Vienna attorney and her husband Martin Freud is foreshadowed by the young lovers' fathers. At first meeting Esti, Sigmund told his son the glamorous woman was "too beautiful" for the clan, meaning her splendor belied a lifestyle not conducive to the frugal Freud ways. And Esti's father, on hearing of her love for Martin, expressed regret she was involved with a man who was "not a financially favorable linkage," and that his family was not respectable since patriarch Sigmund was "just another psychiatrist, and one who writes pornography books at that." Thus begins the ill-fated relationship that would rock two families and a generation of children to come. Sophie weaves into the text letters she inherited, including letters from Martin while he was a prisoner of war, and excerpts from her own diary, kept as an adolescent. The resulting mosaic will fascinate--and perhaps disturb--readers interested in Freud and psychoanalysis, as well as those intrigued by relationships and family.

"In August 1934, without warning or explanation, Wilhelm Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Political expediency and the organization's growing adherence to Freud's death instinct theory had prevailed over Reich's scientific efforts to understand the functioning of what Freud had termed "libido."" "The provocative originality of Reich's work in the years to follow would inevitably distance him from Freudian psychology. But the result was an extraordinary widening of his scientific interests, scrupulously documented in these journals and letters. They record his pioneering laboratory experiments to verify the reality of the pleasure function and his discovery of an unknown energy that exists in all living matter. They record, too, the anguish of a man unafraid to speak his truth in the face of attack and defamation, even though it cost him his profession, his homeland and his adopted country, his wife, his two children, and his lover." "In her introduction to the volume, Mary Boyd Higgins of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust considers key events and themes of Reich's life and work during the years leading up to 1934."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved