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Hermann Hesse’s biography shows: fame alone does not make you happy. Neither successful books nor the Nobel Prize for Literature saved him from mental illness and broken marriages. But it also demonstrates that the dark sides of our lives can be the greatest source of creativity.

People need rules, written ones and unwritten ones. The latter are of particular importance when it comes to demonstrating whether one is a member of a certain community or not. But how is it possible for newcomers to know these rules? By reading about them. That is to say, someone simply needs to write them down, just as Johann Christian Lünig did in his book on court ceremonial.

A skeleton, as the personification of death, takes people from all the different social classes as dance partners and leads them in a round dance: For centuries, the “Dance of Death” was seen as a reminder that every life must end sometime. In the end, could the ancient Dances of Death still teach us how to lead a good life?

Our image of the Swiss is still strongly influenced by what Friedrich Schiller wrote about William Tell. But how did the German poet know that a noble people lived in the Swiss mountains?

In the past, he was simply called “the” poet: Virgil. But how could someone whose style was so elitist become a figure of folk tales and influence Europe’s literary history like hardly anyone else? In the end, it was all the result of a naive misunderstanding ...