On 16 November 1671, Liselotte von der Pfalz, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the Elector of Palatine, was married to Philippe d'Orleans, "Monsieur, " the only brother of Louis XIV. The marriage was not to be a happy one. Liselotte (known in France as Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans, or "Madame") was full of intellectual energy and moral rigor. Homesick for her native Germany, she felt temperamentally ill-suited to life at the French court. The homosexual Monsieur, deeply immersed in the pleasures and intrigues of the court, shared few of his wife's interests. Yet, for the next fifty years, Liselotte remained in France, never far from the center of one of the most glorious courts of Europe. And throughout this period, she wrote letters - sometimes as many as forty a week - to her friends and relatives in Germany. It is from this extraordinary body of correspondence that A Woman's Life in the Court of the Sun King has been fashioned. As introduced and translated by Elborg Forster, the letters have become the remarkable personal narrative of Liselotte's transformation from an innocent, yet outspoken, girl into a formidable observer of great events and human folly.

Married in 1672, at 19, to Louis XIV's bisexual brother, the Duke of Orleans, Liselotte began her voluminous and fascinating correspondence from the Court of Versailles which she continued until her death 50 years later, making her the greatest chronicler of her day.

Describes the social and intellectual life of seventeenth-century France, including gossip about the court of King Louis XIV

Recognized today as one of the great modernist painters, Paula Modersohn-Becker was also a gifted writer, and her large body of letters and journals represent the story of her life. This volume presents the journals and every extant letter, each carefully annotated.

Charles II was a renowned ladies' man but, arguably his greatest love--though not in the Biblical sense--was his sister Minette. Separated from her in their youth by a royal inter-marriage, his letters reveal a tender and humane side not often seen in biographies of this cunning and calculating monarch.

In this quiet and devastating novel about the rise of fascism, Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is assigned to write a routine German lesson on the “The Joys of Duty.” Overfamiliar with these joys, Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, a constable, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist artist from painting and to seize all his “degenerate” work. Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, “where the joys of duty could lead a people.” Translated from the German by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

About the participation of German women in World War II and in the Holocaust.

Friedrich Reiner Niemann was a German soldier serving in the 6th Infantry Division from 1941 to 1945. A well-educated youth from a good family in Westphalia, he was sent to the brutal Russian front four times. He wrote his final two letters home on 12 January 1945, before disappearing during the Soviet Vistula-Oder Offensive. With the assistance of Reiner's extensive correspondence with his family, which has been obtained by the authors, Feldpost documents his life and front-line experiences over this period. Throughout the war, evocative and moving messages were passed between Reiner, on the Eastern Front, and his family, who, by the end of the war, would be scattered throughout Germany. Reiner describes the fighting at Rzhev from 1942-43 and how he survived the destruction of his division during the Soviet summer offensive in 1944. His is a rare view of battles that annihilated entire German divisions and armies. After the Second World War, the Niemann family preserved Reiner's letters and photographs and shipped them to New Orleans, where Reiner's sister, Liselotte Andersson, had emigrated. Neglected in an attic for over fifty years, the documents surfaced only after Hurricane Katrina flooded the family house. Andersson's daughter-inlaw, author Whitney Stewart, discovered the letters in 2012 and contacted Denis Havel to translate them. Together, Havel and Stewart uncovered historical details that enabled them to follow Reiner's trail and finally tell his story.