Locations of events.

We believe today that the intellectual division of the United States is new. But when Sinclair Lewis wrote his novel about an ambitious young woman in a small town in the 1920s, this division already existed. Down-to-earth, traditional, deeply conservative: the small town; progressive, tolerant, detached from reality: the big city. The heroine of the story had already observed at the time that small town and big city are not geographical terms but states of mind.

How should a person live in an alien environment? Should he preserve the eternal laws of his ancestors or adapt to his surroundings? These are the questions around which the short stories of Samuel Agnon revolve. He depicts the life of Jews before the catastrophe of the Holocaust: the security of the shtetl, the demands of the capitalist world, and the flight to the promised land of Palestine.

The world changes and the human being changes with it. One resists the change, another welcomes and promotes it. This was already observed by Ivan Turgenev in his generational novel 'Fathers and Sons.' He dissects the various human types and their relationship to changing values.

When does discontent turn into an uprising? What types of rebels are there? And why does an uprising collapse from within? What happens afterwards? The Ukrainian author Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky analyses in detail in his story Fata Morgana the mechanisms that drive a village to revolt -- and this years before the Russian October Revolution.

In 1849/50, Charles Dickens published David Copperfield, one of his most celebrated novels. The story of the small orphan boy who finds his way into bourgeois society despite all obstacles is among the best-known works of world literature. But David Copperfield is not merely a gripping story — it is also a kind of literary guide to middle-class conduct. We illustrate this with three examples. Part 1 addresses the choice of a marriage partner.