Notes from Führer HQ

Unflinching, eerily poetic dispatches from inside Hitler's war machine, from a mysterious and tragic figure in German literature

As a young writer of blazing promise, Felix Hartlaub went missing in the final days of the Second World War, leaving behind diaries, notes and incomplete drafts that provide a singularly evocative portrait of life in wartime.

From 1941, Hartlaub was posted in various Nazi military command headquarters, a historian tasked with writing the Wehrmacht's official record of the war. In private, he wrote the disaffected, ruthlessly clear-eyed and often beautiful fragments that make up Notes from Führer HQ, now translated into English for the first time by the acclaimed Michael Hofmann.

Moving from a strangely bucolic barracks in Ukraine to tense bureaucratic headquarters on the Eastern Front to the bizarre, seedy micro-climate of a command train, these dispatches conjure the absurdity and turmoil of life within Hitler's war machine through the eyes of a remarkably perceptive, disabused observer.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Michael Hofmann

Felix Hartlaub grew up in Mannheim, the son of an art historian and museum director who was ejected from his post by the Nazis. Hartlaub studied history and was called up immediately upon graduating in 1939. Initially serving in a barrage balloon unit, he was then posted to do archival research and record the progress of the war in occupied Paris and in various Nazi headquarters. He wrote the diaries, notes and drafts for which he is now known throughout the war up until he went missing in Berlin in May 1945.

Michael Hofmann is a translator and poet who was born in Freiburg, Germany. His most recent collection of poetry, One Lark, One Horse, was published by Faber in 2019. He has translated some of the most acclaimed modern and contemporary German-language writers, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Jenny Erpenbeck.

'Hartlaub's narrative skill and unflinching gaze upon the protagonists at the centre of power exert a powerful fascination' NEUE DEUTSCHLAND

'Offers a rare glimpse into everyday life at the epicentre of power' NZZ AM SONTAG

'A master of meticulous observation' DER FREITAG