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Fascinating, eerily poetic dispatches from inside Hitler's war machine, translated into English for the first time, from a mysterious and tragic figure in German literature. Felix Hartlaub is one of the most enigmatic figures of 20th-century German literature. As a young writer of blazing promise, he 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 during the war. From 1941, Hartlaub was posted in various Nazi military command headquarters, a historian tasked with writing the Wehrmacht's official and up-to-the-minute 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 micro-climate of a command train, these dispatches conjure the absurdity and turmoil of life within Hitler's war machine. Soldiers peacock in the late summer heat, trading intel on the local women; officials have guarded conversations in an atmosphere of suffocating anxiety; as the command train hurtles through a chaotic Germany, its shadowy compartments are the scene of booze-fueled assignations. Full of vivid insights and unsettling plays with tone and perspective, Notes from Führer HQ reveals the nightmare of daily life in Nazi headquarters through the eyes of a remarkably perceptive, disabused observer.
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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.
