Search for authors and persons involved.

A world without money, what could that look like? At the end of the 19th century, the English socialist William Morris invented such a world. His utopia doesn’t fully explain how such a society would function, but it is an invitation to dream.

In 1904/1905, Max Weber published his ground-breaking work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He put forward the thesis that the faith of a population is causally linked to the progress of a country. Today, his theses have long been long considered outdated. But why do they still seem so plausible?

Rousseau is rarely associated with modesty. He begins his "Confessions" often treated as the first modern autobiography, with the announcement that his work is unparalleled in history and that he himself is unique. However, it would be too easy to reduce this complex and complicated personality to its thoroughly self-confident tones.

Stifter polarized despite his romantic-sounding stories. His texts divided the readership. Thomas Mann criticized the old-fashioned, moralizing style, while Friedrich Nietzsche praised his work as a literary icon. What is it about Stifter's texts that some appreciate and others revile?

The subtitle of Wilhelm Raabe's Stopfkuchen is " a sea- and murder story." But don't expect a shallow whodunit because of that. While the reader is still trying to sort out the complex time and space levels of events, he realizes that the novel has an even deeper level...

Grotesque, vulgar, obscene – but also learned, sensitive, subtle. There is no other ancient book as full of excesses as the Satyricon of Titus Petronius. The wealth of ideas, humor and linguistic diversity make this portrait of the mores of the Roman imperial era a pleasure to read!

The world of fantasy literature would look very different today if it wasn’t for the medieval Eddas. After all, the two texts were major source of inspiration for J.R.R Tolkien and his successors. The ancient stories of the Eddas take us into the world of Norse mythology; tell of heroes and gods, of dwarves and giants.

For over 200 years, Paris tourists with a penchant for great love stories have visited the tomb of Abaelard and Heloise. The heartbreaking love letters between the theologian and his pupil are a unique document of the Middle Ages. They tell of a tragic love story - which, as so often, should be questioned.

"Schloß Gripsholm" by Kurt Tucholsky is many things at once: a cheerful summer vacation, a love story told with a twinkle in the eye, a satire on man and his absurd actions and, last but not least, a persiflage of the author on himself. No wonder that many consider it Tuchosky's best work.

Soldier, cardsharp, nobleman: with his description of the fictional career of Barry Lyndon, Thackery takes us on a tour across the social classes of the 18th century. His story of the rise and fall of the Irish upstart is a satirical masterpiece.

In his stories, Arthur Schnitzler set a monument to "ordinary" people. The description of their everyday worries reveals to us: we are not that different from the people in Vienna around 1900.

With the end of First World War, the centuries-long Habsburg monarchy and the splendor of the old Austria also came to an end. It had been looming for some time. No one described this age before the abyss as sensitively and devotedly as Joseph Roth in his novel Radetzkymarsch.

“The most profound book of mankind”, this is how, in all modesty, Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of probably his most popular work, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. At that time, the wild child generated buzz among European intellectuals. What is the book actually about? Not an easy question...

Manesse's collection contains, in addition to Kafka's world-famous novel fragments, a multitude of lesser-known tales that are equally fascinating and enigmatic. They have the potential to plunge the reader into deep philosophical crisis - or to merely inspire a cheerful smile.

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) dedicates her short stories to her homeland, the New England coast. She lovingly captures the peculiarities of the region and its inhabitants, exploring the contrasting relationship between town and country, civilization and nature. Join her to the land of the pointed firs.

Personal freedom versus moral values: Since the beginning of English settlement in North America, this conflict has shaped the history of the United States, and continues to do so to this day. Nathaniel Hawthorne devoted his novel "The Scarlet Letter." to this contradiction in 1850.

In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, although he initiated comprehensive reforms. After all, no one in Russia any longer believed that the tsar and the nobility could bring about political improvement. They are discredited, and novels like Oblomov, published in 1859, have contributed to this.

Welcome to Erewhon, a fascinating non-place between utopia and dystopia that is both a reflection and a parody of our society. In his satirical novel "Erewhon" from 1872, Samuel Butlers raises surprisingly topical questions about technology and humanity.

Who were these men with whom the Spanish built their Empire? What is the nature of someone who sails into the unknown, to capture gold and silver in the New World for the Spanish King? Anyone looking for an answer to this question will find it in the autobiography of Captain Alonso de Contreras.

The Fiddler on the Roof is one of the most famous musicals of all time. It is based on Scholem Alejchem's novel Tewje, der Milchmann. The humorous stories about a Jewish dairyman, told with sensitivity and wit, made Alejchem one of the most important authors of Yiddish-language literature.

Would you like to get to know a bestseller from the Middle Ages? It's about blood and violence and yet everything ends well. No, we're not talking about a soap opera, but about the Legenda aurea by Jacobus de Voragine.

In 1755 the earth trembled and left the city of Lisbon in ruins. Voltaire took this as an opportunity to reflect on this "dear" God in "Candide". Its basic question is, how a good God can tolerate evil in the world. Is the world completely abandoned by God? Read on.

Gulliver's Travels didn't start as a children's book, but as a spiteful and apt criticism of his contemporaries. If you want to know who Jonathan Swift was teasing with his Houyhnhnms and the Brobdingnags, read on.

Patrick Süskind has created a classic with his drama about the man with the double bass. How does it feel to be at the back of the shadows loving the woman in the spotlight. Read why the answer to this question found such a wide audience.

The description of his journey to Asia in the 13th century made him famous. Like no other, Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant and adventurer, stands for wanderlust and the desire for the exotic. His travelogue is without doubt a milestone.

This fable is one of the post-war classics par excellence: Orwell's "Animal Farm". It masterfully illustrates how well-intentioned ideas for a better life for all can quickly turn into their opposite. Intended as a critique of Stalinism, the book's basic cautionary message can easily be applied to today's ideologies.

Find out what significance Proper Mérimée has for our imagination of the French past and why it is still worth reading a book today that deals with the bloody conflict between Huguenots and Catholics.

In Italy, Manzoni's historical novel The Betrothed is still taught in schools. Find out why here with us.

A power-hungry captain and an intellectual castaway: they are fascinated by each other. In The Sea Wolf, Jack Londons depicts the clash of ultimate pragmatism and urban ideals. How does it end? Continue reading.

"Clothes make the man", Gottfried Keller illustrates the truth of this proverb in a story from Seldwyla. Not only this story shows how well Keller knew human nature. That is why his book, written in the mid-19th century, is still worth reading today.

Do you like fantasy? Then you will love E.T.A. Hoffmann! At the beginning of the 19th century, he created fantasy worlds to escape from his daily routine as a lawyer. Lose yourself with us in his dream worlds.

This thriller brought about a turning point: in it, the good investigator no longer fights the bad criminal, but good and bad are mixed in many layers. But that's what makes this novel so exciting.

Shortly before the end of the Second World War, when Europe was ravaged by violence and destruction, the Zurich publishing house Conzett & Huber began a series of books that tied with the spirit of reason and humanity. The German prince of poets Goethe was one of the first authors to be published. Here you will read, why.

Fontane's literary mastery is evident in his seminal novel Effi Briest. From today's perspective, the conventions and constraints described therein seem hardly comprehensible. You can find out here why it is still worth reading this book.

Sherlock Holmes is the father of all detectives. With him, Conan Doyle created the pattern every television inspector is still modelled on today. Join us to have a look at the beginning of the crime novel.

Dostoyevsky’s Idiot illustrates that the opposite of "good" is not "evil" but "well intentioned". "The idiot" wants to do good and fails terribly, and that’s relevant today: Finally, our world has become so complex that nobody can know for sure what’s good and what’s bad for it.

Dante's Divine Comedy is the most important work in Italian literary history and at least parts of it belong to the “Splatter and Blood” genre. Even then, people simply enjoyed reading about how the wicked are punished in the most horrific ways.

Cervantes' novel about the Knight of Sorrowful Countenance is world literature. His "tilting at windmills" is part of the English vocabulary. Even more than 400 years later, this book is still a pleasure to read.

It could be so simple: a man and a woman fall in love, get married and live happily together – not so with Charlotte Brontë. In Jane Eyre she showed how complicated it can be and thus created topoi that have become the standard in romance novels.

No book by Bradbury is as topical as his parable of the decline of written expression. If you don't want to hurt anyone, don't write anything. If you want to make everyone equal, those unwilling to learn are your benchmark, TV is your tool. The Fahrenheit 451 society sees no other solution than to burn all the books.

More than 70 years ago, Ray Bradbury wrote a masterpiece of science fiction and psychology: How do people behave in the face of the stranger? How do the seemingly defenseless strangers fight back? The colonization of Mars provides the backdrop for a study in human error.

This book was a scandal! Never before had an author written so explicitly about the dark side of the big cities. With his Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire paved the way for poetry describing today’s world.

A graceful lady of the castle, a heroic knight, dragons to conquer, vows of love – what reads like the conventional ingredients for a classic medieval novel can be traced back to this book, among others. Without a doubt, this work manifests one of the origins of German-language literature.

What's it like waking up and being stuck in a donkey skin? The Roman author Apuleius shows his readers their everyday life from the perspective of a donkey. The Golden Donkey is a funny satire and a realistic picture of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Andersch's probably most important novel takes us back to the time of National Socialism. Five completely different people give themselves up in search of freedom, but recognize more and more clearly the limitations of their possibilities and the constraints of their existence. The plot inevitably leads us to ask how we would have acted in those times.

It is a truism that life comes easier for beautiful people. While we are ashamed of our superficiality today, educated contemporaries of the 18th and 19th century read Lavater, who told them why their preconceived ideas were justified.

If there is one man responsible for shaping how women were viewed by educated men for centuries, it’s Giovanni Boccaccio. His book ‘On Famous Women’ inspired artists of both sexes.

Every now and then, you will still find beautifully embellished letters patent for people who did not make it into any history book. They are a wonderful record of the society of the Ancien Régime – a society in which every commoner sought personal nobility, even under the enlightened ruler Joseph II.

The 19th century saw dramatic technological progress. Thanks to the railway, steam boats, and the expansion of transport networks, man could travel the world faster than ever before. In his novel, Jules Verne writes about the fascination with this progress.

In 1984 Alphaville want to be forever young, wanna be forever young… In 2013, Lana del Rey wonders, “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” But is eternal youth really the answer? Oscar Wilde’s novel raises serious doubts.

When the American deck-hand Gale, while on shore leave in Antwerp, misses the departure of his freighter, he does not know what catastrophic events he has just set in motion: the extinction of his existence …

It’s the most sought-after metal in the world: In the Middle Ages, alchemists tried to produce it from scratch in vain, in the Early Modern world people persistently searched for it in rivers and mountains. A novel about the power of gold.

We tend to believe we’re constantly reinventing the wheel. We’re not. Take any contemporary trend, from “tiny houses” to “minimalism” to “tidying up with Marie Kondo” – Henry David Thoreau was already living them 200 years ago.

What do you associate with the word “pirate”? Far-away treasure islands, buried treasure chests, peg legs, and parrots on the shoulder? That is thanks to the Scottish author R. L. Stevenson, who with his novel created the mother of all pirate stories.

One fateful night Viktor Frankenstein creates his monster – that much most of us know. But who created Frankenstein, the book that is, and why?

As a lyrical form, the sonnet is relatively simple and at the same time extremely versatile, the all-rounder of poems, so to speak. That made it so popular at times that practically everyone wrote them. Including, of course, William Shakespeare.

How many US-American ministers from German descent do you know? There is Henry Kissinger, of course, known for the role during the Cold War. If you can’t think of anyone else, keep on reading. Because he wasn’t the only one.

Samuel Johnson said about this novel you would have to hang yourself if you read it for the plot. Why Richardson’s work, to this day, triggers head shaking and moral outrage but also empathy.

Can real Socialism overcome man’s greed for money? If you read the book “The Golden Calf” authored by the two Soviet writers Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, you have to answer the question clearly with a “no”.

As early as 1860 the author of “Max Havelaar” called attention to the exploitative and inhuman conditions under which colonial goods were produced and traded. Unfortunately, most of the products we consume today are still not “fair trade.”

Being obsessed with an idea is perhaps a problem in real life but it does make for good literature. Viktor Frankenstein is obsessed with bringing a dead back to life. Jay Gatsby with the American Dream. And Captain Ahab with hunting the white whale.

The “Knigge” has suffered the same fate as many other famous books: It says something completely different than what we think it says. The real Knigge, after all, was not interested in prescribing stiff rules of behavior but in creating respectful interpersonal relations.

Do you know psycho thrillers which feature uncanny children or children possessed by demons as protagonists? The innocence we associate with the child in combination with its apparent corruption always makes for a particularly spine-chilling experience. Henry James wrote an early precursor of such modern thrillers.

In the 19th came the industrialization, and with it the pauperization of workers everywhere. Victor Hugo wrote so heart-wrenchingly about their misery in his social novel Les Misérables that the story still lures millions of musical-goers to the theaters today.

A society which knows no god is a brutal society. At least that is what von Horváth’s novel claims. Alluding to Nazi Germany, it shows how one’s own survival trumps humanity, and cowardice wins against civic courage.

The novel did not make much of an impact after its publication in the late 1920s. Until it was rediscovered in the 1960s and became the Bible of the hippie movement. How Hesse distilled the spirit of an entire generation into one book.

Once upon a time, there lived two brothers by the name of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. They set out to collect all the fairytales the people up and down the country would tell them. After all, it would be a shame if they were lost because no one had bothered to write them down…

As a child, you can hardly wait to be a grown-up. Owning your own money, eating as many sweets as you want and staying up late! And what do grown-ups dream of? Their childhood of course. To escape from their boring everyday lives, back to a childish fantasy world, without work or duties…

Good literature can create new mental images in your mind and connect things that you have never seen in connection before. Imagine this, for instance: Money is like language. And language is like money. Intrigued? Then read on…

Can we really ever start over in life? Invent ourselves anew? Or will our past, our mistakes, our failure always be with us? These are the questions Max Frisch asks in „I’m Not Stiller”- a novel that will make him world famous.

Many factors play a role in choosing a partner: looks, status, education, money. Of course ideally your other half has it all. But what if you have to choose? This novel zooms in on the family and marriage politics of the bourgeoisie in Berlin around 1900.

Flaubert’s novel tells the story of common folks, just like you and me, and their common struggles: unhappy marriage, extramarital affair, shopping addiction. Nothing that would shock readers – at least not readers in the 21st century, that is.

„Diamonds are a girl’s best friends,” Marilyn Monroe sang in 1949, but the idea that women want to be impressed by money is much older. The tragic story of Jay Gatsby, which glitters with real and fake gold, shows that this strategy doesn’t always succeed.

Literary history is populated by extraordinary heroes, odysseys, and battles. George Eliot, by contrast, pays homage to ordinary, average people, their worries and problems. Because it is these ordinary, small people, after all, who together make up the big wide world.

It’s the time of the Cold War. The cultural imaginary is populated by mad scientists, nuclear physicists, and villains, from James Bond’s Dr. No to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Friedrich Dürrenmatt brings the question of the responsibility of science in these times to the theater stage.

It’s the high school reunion of your worst nightmares. A newly rich billionaire returns to the small town of her childhood and presents the townsfolk with an ultimatum: Either they kill one of their own or the old lady will financially ruin the town.

Two things Joseph Conrad equally loved equally were being at sea and writing. Based on his own experiences, he tells stories of far-away islands, typhoons, the impenetrable African jungle, steamship expeditions on the Congo river, and mutinies at sea.

Going on pilgrimage is a pious enterprise but, let’s be honest, also a boring one. To combat the boredom, the travelers in Geoffrey Chaucer’s monumental work launch a storytelling competition. Who tells the most entertaining story? Nun, knight, or doctor?

What’s the price for a human life? How much would it take for you to go to war? The biography of the Swiss farmer Ulrich Bräker shows: Human life was cheap during the Seven Years’ War – just like the mercenaries’ pay.

The opposite of love is not hate but indifference – as Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights shows. Because their love cannot be, two lovers destroy each other until the bitter end, in this depressing but beautifully atmospheric novel.

Ungrateful daughters and betrayed fathers: an old topos in world literature. Just like Shakespeare’s King Lear, Balzac’s Old Goriot has to learn the hard way what it means when his daughters take away everything you own. Until you end up emptyhanded.

Jane Austen is sometimes devalued as “women’s literature”: sentimental, touchy-feely love stories, you know. In Victorian England, however, critics thought her not feminine enough. Why such categorizations are silly and Jane Austen’s novels sentimental only in the best way.

We know Andersen above all as the creator of the little mermaid. Yet he wrote a plethora of other fairytales for children, full of magic and grace. Why reading the Danish poet today is still worth it.

How do you survive a plague? Right, by fleeing the locus of the epidemic outbreak as fast as you can. Which is exactly what the rich and beautiful in Boccaccio’s Decameron do. And to pass the time, the take turns telling each other stories.

How can you teach people to good and kind to each other? Perhaps best by showing negative examples for a deterrent effect. That’s exactly what an 18th-century satirical etiquette book did presenting rules on how (not!) to treat other people.

In the age of Wikipedia, with thousands of people contributing from all over the world, it is hard to imagine how someone could single-handedly compile 20-volume lexicons. Leus Swiss Lexicon is just that: a giant effort to write the biggest, most comprehensive lexicon of its time.

If you’ve read 1984, you know how easy it is to falsify the past. But this knowledge is nothing new. For centuries, rulers paid historians (and some still do) to create an embellished version of the past and the relevant sources, until the Maurists got wise to them.

In 1581, the Froschauer publishing house in Zurich created a complete edition of all works written by Huldrych Zwingli. And there was a good reason for it – which was directly linked to the circumstances of the death of the Zurich reformer in 1531.

Already during his lifetime Luther was the Protestant equivalent of a saint. All the words of wisdom he is said to have shared on all sorts of events have been written down for posterity by his followers. Johannes Aurifaber published all of it as “Luther’s Table talk, with his very own agenda.

Only a few books have such a spectacular transmission history as the works of Tacitus. Their story begins with thefts in German monasteries. However, the author only became truly appealing when the Reformation had created a new national German identity.

A mediocre French author writes mediocre poems about spring and love. But even though his beloved is a prostitute, his literary kisses are rather chaste.

In the 17th century, Amsterdam was Europe’s number-one city for scientific research. One of the city’s great minds was the brilliant physician Gerhard Blasius, one of the co-founders of comparative anatomy. And, typically enough, his last book was a handbook of animal anatomy.

There is no war that shaped Germany more than the conflict between the emperor and the empire that went down in history as the Thirty Years’ War. The fact that Germany is a federal republic now can be traced back to this war – and to the peace that put an end to it.

Sometimes the world changes for the better, at least a little bit. This happens whenever brave people realise that only because something has been done for centuries doesn’t make it right. But how is it possible to make a lasting change?

Centuries-old prejudices against Islam were softened when a French diplomat translated the Quran into his native language in 1647. Soon, many European intellectuals were studying the text. They learned that the faith that had been demonized for so long was on a par with Christianity – a revelation that was a milestone for the Enlightenment. But why was a French diplomat, of all people, the first to translate the Quran into a modern language?

Voltaire used the judicial murder of the French Protestant Jean Calas in order to persuade intellectuals throughout Europe to follow his line of uncompromising tolerance. However, some fell victim to this campaign. We present the book of one of those victims.

World history is the succession of four great empires. This view was widely accepted until the 18th century and is based on a vision of the prophet Daniel. Nobody canonized this worldview as effectively as the Reformation scholar Johannes Sleidanus did.

In the world of ancient mythology it’s easy to get confused – with all the divine epithets and family relationships. Even Goethe and Schiller had that problem. To find out what they needed to know, they consulted the “Hederich”, the go-to reference work for ancient mythology of the 18th century.

Nowadays, building walls has once again become the political method of choice. But in the early modern period, the introduction of cannons made walls completely obsolete. In books like this one by Daniel Specklin, we can find out how people managed to protect their cities back then.

He is the prototypical old miser, his name synonymous with the expression itself: Ebenezer Scrooge. But what is so terribly wrong with the old man from Dickens’ Christmas Carol anyway?