The first U.S. edition of Dagerman’s account of postwar life in Germany

Life is full of possibilities for recent college graduate Autumn Hummel. But the path she expected to take after school turns in a different direction when she receives a mysterious letter. Jon McFarland, a man Autumn has never met, has left her his South Carolina plantation near Georgetown, her childhood vacationing spot. Autumn chooses to accept the inheritance and moves into the sprawling Southern mansion where she meets the house's loveable staff. There's Fanny, the middle-aged gardener whose family has worked at the McFarland plantation for generations and Ian, the maintenance man who moved from the North to embrace a slower pace of life. But it's Autumn's handsome next-door neighbor, Boyd Masters, who captures her attention. Yet the beauty and charisma of Autumn's new life soon fade as one mystery after another emerges, the most important being why McFarland left her the plantation in the first place. As Autumn researches the connection, she begins to revisit her summer vacation memories and soon realizes that before she can pursue a happy future, she must deal with her painful past.

A biographical history of Aleister Crowley’s activities in Berlin from 1930 to 1932 as Hitler was rising to power • Examines Crowley’s focus on his art, his work as a spy for British Intelligence, his colorful love life and sex magick exploits, and his contacts with magical orders • Explores Crowley’s relationships with Berlin’s artists, filmmakers, writers, and performers such as Christopher Isherwood, Jean Ross, and Aldous Huxley • Recounts the fates of Crowley’s friends and colleagues under the Nazis as well as what happened to Crowley’s lost art exhibition Gnostic poet, painter, writer, and magician Aleister Crowley arrived in Berlin on April 18, 1930. As prophet of his syncretic religion “Thelema,” he wanted to be among the leaders of art and thought, and Berlin, the liberated future-gazing metropolis, wanted him. There he would live, until his hurried departure on June 22, 1932, as Hitler was rapidly rising to power and the black curtain of intolerance came down upon the city. Known to his friends affectionately as “The Beast,” Crowley saw the closing lights of Berlin’s artistic renaissance of the Weimar period when Berlin played host to many of the world’s most outstanding artists, writers, filmmakers, performers, composers, architects, philosophers, and scientists, including Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Ethel Mannin, Otto Dix, Aldous Huxley, Jean Ross, Christopher Isherwood, and many other luminaries of a glittering world soon to be trampled into the mud by the global bloodbath of World War II. Drawing on previously unpublished letters and diary material by Crowley, Tobias Churton examines Crowley’s years in Berlin and his intense focus on his art, his work as a spy for British Intelligence, his colorful love life and sex magick exploits, and his contacts with German Theosophy, Freemasonry, and magical orders. He recounts the fates of Crowley’s colleagues under the Nazis as well as what happened to Crowley’s lost art exhibition--six crates of paintings left behind in Germany as the Gestapo was closing in. Revealing the real Crowley long hidden from the historical record, Churton presents “the Beast” anew in all his ambiguous and, for some, terrifying glory, at a blazing, seminal moment in the history of the world.

After the fall of the Wall, Berlin is full of disused spaces and abandoned buildings, just waiting to be filled with new life. It is unclear who owns any of this, which allows the techno scene to take over these new empty spaces in both halves of the city. Clubs, galleries, ateliers and studios spring up – only to disappear again a few weeks later. Soon Berlin has become the epicentre of a new culture, attracting enthusiastic followers from all over the world to clubs like the Tresor and the E-Werk. Wearing gasmasks and welding goggles they dance the night away to the jackhammer sound of previously obscure Detroit DJs. Among them are writers, artists, photographers, designers, DJs, club-owners, music producers, bouncers and scenesters, people from the centre of the movement and from its peripheries – in Der Klang der Familie they all get to have their say and paint a vibrant picture of a time when it felt like everything was possible.

On Christmas Day, 1986 a seventy-year-old widow’s body was discovered inside a wheelie bin in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Despite a long and intensive investigation, the police fail to unearth a motive or identify a suspect. Lacking any clues, the police file it as a cold case. Some half a century earlier the Third Reich ramps up its offensive to arrest and deport to the East the Nazi regime’s classification of undesirables. As part of the sweep, a young girl is arrested along with her parents. They are placed in a box car and forced to endure a three-day harrowing train journey. The final stop: Auschwitz. On arrival she is separated from her parents to never see them again and is forced to suffer years of punishing labour, near-starvation and daily horrors. She is freed six years later when the Russian army invades Poland and liberates Auschwitz. Vindicated by her survival she sets out on a journey all the way around the world to Australia, in search of the one person that she blames for her ordeal in Auschwitz. Is that the clue that the police missed in trying to solve the crime?

Abandoned by her mother, who left to pursue a career as a camp guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, loathed by her step-mother, cooped up in a cellar, starved, parched, lonely amidst the fetid crush of her neighbours, Helga Schneider endured the horrors of wartime Berlin. The Bonfire of Berlin is a searing account of her survival. The grinding misery of hunger, combined with the terror of air-raids, the absence of fresh water and the constant threat of death and disease served not to unite the tenants and neighbours of her apartment block but rather to intensify the minor irritations of communal life into flashpoints of rage and violence. And with Russian victory the survivors could not look forward a return to peacetime but rather to pillage and rape. It was only gradually that Schneider's life returned to some kind of normality, as her beloved father returned from the front, carrying his own scars of the war. This shocking book evokes the reality of life in a wartime city in all its brutality and deprivation, while retaining a kernel of hope that while life remains not all is lost.