From Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, edited by Walter Kempowski, out this month from W. W. Norton. On April 25, 1945, Soviet…
By Alexander Kluge, from Air Raid, an account of the destruction of Halberstadt, Germany, by American bomber squadrons on April 8, 1945, out this month from Seagull Books. Kluge is…
By Jonathan Franzen, from a footnote to his translation of “Nestroy and Posterity,” a 1912 essay by the Austrian satirist, playwright, poet, aphorist, and critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936). In the…