Sputnik, the Virgin Mary, a murder... 1957. In the secluded Eastern European village of Baia Luna, life orbits around church, work, home and the pub. This is very much the case for fifteen-year-old Pavel Botev - that is, until the seismic shift of world politics is felt even in his small community. When Communist party officials arrive and claim Baia Luna for the Soviet Union, Pavel's schoolteacher commits grisly suicide. Piecing together her diaries, Pavel slowly unravels the tragic story of his schoolteacher's affair with an ambitious party official and, on the very last page, he finds a single scrawled message - Send him to hell. Naturally, Pavel promises his dead teacher that he'll do just that. Meanwhile, crackled radio reports of the US-Soviet space race keep the villagers occupied and somewhat imaginative; when the statue of the Virgin Mary is stolen from the chapel, Pavel's grandfather and his gypsy best friend assume the obvious - that the Russians have kidnapped it and sent it to the moon. It seems farfetched, but when the old man mysteriously disappears, it seems that maybe the Kremlin really has taken an extraordinary interest in an ordinary place, and only Pavel stands in the way...

Packed with contemporary dialogue, engaging readings, active vocabulary, and an assortment of hands-on activities, NEUE HORIZONTE, 8e skillfully instills both communicative and grammatical competency using a diversified methodology that adapts well to a variety of teaching and learning styles. The new edition combines a vibrant new four-color design with its signature clear grammar presentations, practical vocabulary lessons, beautiful prose and poetry, and more. Immersing readers into a complete language-learning experience, its unique integrated treatment stresses a balance of communicative competence, cultural awareness, and mastery of language structures.

Here, Rudiger Safranski sets his sights on the writer considered the Shakespeare of German literature. Goethe (1749-1832) awakened a burgeoning German nation and the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Safranski scoured Goethe's oeuvre, relying on primary sources as well as his correspondence with contemporaries and their comments to one another, to produce an illuminating portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Set against the cultural and political turmoil of Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goethe, who intersected with almost every great figure of his age, is thrillingly re-created here. As Safranski shows, Goethe's greatest creation, even in comparison to his masterpiece Faust, was his own life.

A volume of carefully focused essays illuminating the works of one of the leading 20th-century German writers. Alfred Doeblin (1878-1957) was one of the great German-Jewish writers of the 20th century, a major figure in the German avant-garde before the First World War and a leading intellectual during the Weimar Republic. Doeblin greatly influenced the history of the German novel: his best-known work, the best-selling 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, has frequently been compared in its use of internal monologue and literary montage to James Joyce's Ulysses and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer . Doeblin's oeuvre is by no means limited to novels, but in this genre, he offered a surprising variety of narrative techniques, themes, structures, and outlooks. Doeblin's impact on German writers after the Second World War was considerable: Gunter Grass, for example, acknowledged him as "my teacher." And yet, while Alexanderplatz continues to fascinate the reading public, it has overshadowed therest of Doeblin's immense oeuvre. This volume of carefully focused essays seeks to do justice to such important texts as Doeblin's early stories, his numerous other novels, his political, philosophical, medical, autobiographical, and religious essays, his experimental plays, and his writings on the new media of cinema and radio. Contributors: Heidi Thomann Tewarson, David Dollenmayer, Neil H. Donahue, Roland Dollinger, Veronika Fuechtner, Gabriele Sander, Erich Kleinschmidt, Wulf Koepke, Helmut F. Pfanner, Helmuth Kiesel, Klaus Muller-Salget, Christoph Bartscherer, Wolfgang Dusing. Roland Dollinger is Associate Professor of German at Sarah Lawrence College; Wulf Koepke is Professor Emeritus of German at Texas A&M University; Heidi Thomann Tewarson is Professor of German at Oberlin College.

Packed with contemporary dialogue, engaging readings, active vocabulary, and an assortment of hands-on activities, NEUE HORIZONTE, 8e skillfully instills both communicative and grammatical competency using a diversified methodology that adapts well to a variety of teaching and learning styles. The new edition combines a vibrant new four-color design with its signature clear grammar presentations, practical vocabulary lessons, beautiful prose and poetry, and more. Immersing readers into a complete language-learning experience, its unique integrated treatment stresses a balance of communicative competence, cultural awareness, and mastery of language structures.

Translated from the original Kindheit, written between 1958 and 1980, and published in German in 2003, David Dollenmayer's edition makes this remarkable story available to a much-deserved wider audience. Moses Rosenkranz came from impoverished roots in the rural Bucovina and gained acclaim for his poetry only late in life. He became an intimate of poet Paul Celan, with whom he was interned in a fascist work camp during World War II. With his richly detailed recollections, a colorful parade of characters, and a remarkable eloquence, Rosenkranz recaptures a vanished moment of cultural history. The author's unvarnished portraits of love, jealousy, and passion in his large family bring a fresh resonance to his poetry.