What constitutes a family today and who is actually part of it?

Angela and Erich are the parents, Simon and Katrin the children. Together they make up a family. But just listing the members doesn't mean it is a proper family. Erich and Angela have ...

In her new novel, Antje Rávic Strubel gives us a highjacked plane and a difficult, if not impossible, quest for the truth. She has taken a real story as her inspiration: in 1978 a Tupolew 134 was hijacked by two citizens from East Germany who were on a flight from Gdansk to West Berlin. The ...

The true, world-spanning story of an extraordinary book

Two men, two centuries - bound together by one extraordinary book. Thomas Bridges, the author, grows up as the foster son of a British missionary at the end of the world, in Tierra del Fuego, among the children of the ...

A story of human longing and failure, of German history, and the ethics of science

Against his father's will, Hermann Oberth moves to Göttingen in 1920 in order to study physics - the most exciting science of his age in the most exciting city there is. Hermann wants to turn the ...

A girl named Johnny

Early on, Joana Wolkenzin knows that she is different. She spends hours reading and learns song lyrics by heart. As she grows older, she falls in love with both boys and girls. In the No Man's Land of Western Pomerania in the 1990s, she gives herself a new name: ...

An extraordinary adventure and an unforgettable hero

Bartholomew is an orphan from Bombay, he's twelve years old and speaks almost as many languages. This is why, in the year 1854, he is hired as a translator by the brothers Schlagintweit from Germany, who, with the support of ...

David Ostrich, an Orientalist from Toronto, is about to investigate the legends from the book of Genesis on the Persian Gulf, when he receives an astonishing commission from the supervisor of a giant dam construction. Ostrich is asked to track down the supervisor's missing daughter and, while ...

"You're a damned liar!" Just as Louis de Montesanto is about to start his lecture in front of the venerable Royal Geographical Society, a heckler exposes him as a charlatan. The small man with the massive head was born in a small Swiss mountain village in 1849 under the name of Hans Roth, and ...

"Hartmut lived with us. Yesterday he set himself on fire."

When it comes to soccer, ten-year-old Hanno Kelsterberg knows everything there is to know. This is also true when it comes to staging demonstrations. For the past two years, the ascetic protester Hartmut Gründler has been ...

How do you get to grips with your life?

Johanna can't believe that she and Boris have never even kissed. Ana-Clara, Boris's Portuguese girlfriend can't be the reason. Johanna always wants to know exactly what's going on - and why. How come one of her classmates made another one his slave, ...

A beer cellar, a luxury hotel and a grandmother who dies twice over…

Resplendent with glamour but overcast by many a shadow, the story of the Salz family centres on Leipzig's up-market Fürstenhof hotel. Salz Sr. buys it in 1914, but his actress daughter Lola refuses to ...

Frederick only ever wanted to dance, nothing else; and he achieved such unprecedented levels of accomplishment that no one could come close to him. Yet his unsurpassable perfection became his own undoing-because anything that's beyond compare cries out to be destroyed.

Fred Astaire ...