Felix Hartlaub – författare

New paperback of the acclaimed, sharply immediate diary written from the heart of Occupied Paris by a classic German writer

'Delicately drawn, inventive and unmistakably Parisian' Financial Times

The writer Felix Hartlaub died in obscurity at just 31, vanishing from Berlin in 1945. He left behind a small oeuvre of private writings from the Second World War: fragments and observations of life from the midst of catastrophe that, with their evocative power and precision, would make a permanent place for him in German letters.

Posted to Paris in 1940 to conduct archival research, Hartlaub recorded his impressions of the unfamiliar city in notebooks that document with unparalleled immediacy the daily realities of occupation. With a painter's eye for detail, Hartlaub writes of the bustle of civilians and soldiers in cafés, of half-seen trysts during blackout hours and the sublime light of Paris in spring. Clouds Over Paris is a unique testament to the persistence of ordinary life through disaster.

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