Memoir of student life, coffee-house intellectuals, and romantic experiences of the Austrian playwright during the last days of the Hapsburg Empire.

The Vienna in which Franz Schubert lived for the thirty-one years of his life was not just a city of music, dance, and coffeehouses - a centre of important achievements in the arts. It was also the capital of an empire that was constantly at war in the composer's youth and that became a police state during his maturity.

“An impassioned indictment, one that glows with the heat of a prosecution motivated by an ethical imperative.” —Lisa Appignanesi, New York Review of Books In the first comprehensive history of the links between autism and Nazism, prize-winning historian Edith Sheffer uncovers how a diagnosis common today emerged from the atrocities of the Third Reich. As the Nazi regime slaughtered millions across Europe during World War Two, it sorted people according to race, religion, behavior, and physical condition. Nazi psychiatrists targeted children with different kinds of minds—especially those thought to lack social skills—claiming the Reich had no place for them. Hans Asperger and his colleagues endeavored to mold certain “autistic” children into productive citizens, while transferring others to Spiegelgrund, one of the Reich’s deadliest child killing centers. In this unflinching history, Sheffer exposes Asperger’s complicity in the murderous policies of the Third Reich.

The personal memoir of a Nazi soldier, from joining the German Army in 1941 through his time as a Panzer on the Eastern Front. Originally written only for his daughter, Armin Schedierbauer’s Adventures in My Youth chronicles his time as a solider during World War II. As an infantry officer with the 252nd Infantry Division, German Army, Schedierbauer saw four years of combat on the Eastern Front. After joining his unit during the winter of 1942, he was wounded six times and had firsthand experience of the Soviet offensives in the summer of 1944 and January 1945. While fighting in East Prussia, he was captured by the Soviets and not released until 1947. Schedierbauer was only twenty-one years old when the war ended, and his memoir recollects the experiences he went through as a young man on the front.

The inspiration for the major film Jojo Rabbit by Taika Waititi An avid member of the Hitler Youth in 1940s Vienna, Johannes Betzler discovers his parents are hiding a Jewish girl named Elsa behind a false wall in their home. His initial horror turns to interest—then love and obsession. After his parents disappear, Johannes is the only one aware of Elsa’s existence in the house and he alone is responsible for her fate. Drawing strength from his daydreams about Hitler, Johannes plans for the end of the war and what it might mean for him and Elsa. The inspiration for the major film Jojo Rabbit by Taika Waititi, Caging Skies, sold in over twenty countries, is a work of rare power; a stylistic and storytelling triumph. Startling, blackly comic, and written in Christine Leunens’s gorgeous, muscular prose, this novel, her U.S. debut, is singular and unforgettable.

A memoir of family history, personal identity, and WWII Vienna—a “well-researched, intimate, evocative look at some of the 20th century’s foulest days” (Kirkus). In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg’s great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, survives by hiding in an apartment in the middle of Nazi-controlled Vienna. But this is no Anne Frank-like existence; teenage Hans passes time in the municipal library and buys standing room tickets to the Vienna State Opera. He never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique story in magnificent reportage. She also portrays Vienna’s undying allure. Although they tried living in the United States after World War Two, both grandparents eventually returned to the Austrian capital. The author, too, has returned to her native Vienna after living in New York herself, and her fierce attachment to her birthplace enlivens her engrossing biographical history. I Belong to Vienna is a probing tale of heroism and resilience marked by a surprising freshness as a new generation comes to terms with history’s darkest era.

"An original and brilliant thesis, exposing a long misunderstood figure. A great book." -- Bernard Avishai "Excellent... a highly revealing portrait that demolishes Herzl-the-icon." -- Michael Marrus "Other biographers... have illuminated aspects of [Herzl's] life, but none has been able to produce the kind of intellectual biography that we have here. Jacques Kornberg has done an admirable job of plumbing the depths of Herzl's mind to try to come to an understanding of just why he became a Zionist and why he was literally consumed with promoting Zionist goals." -- Cithara "With compassion and critical balance, placing his subject well within his Austrian milieu, Kornberg analyzes Herzl's rhetoric, tergiversations, and profound ambivalence over his politics and identity."Â -- Choice "... a masterful display of the sources... " -- American Historical Review "... stimulating, provocative and agreeably iconoclastic... powerful and compelling." -- German History A novel and provocative explanation of Theodor Herzl's founding of Zionism as a way of resolving his personal crisis over his Jewish identity.