He succeeds in breathing life into his literary world, just as real painters do with their paintings. That is why his characters remain alive until the very end. Else Lasker-Schüler called Günther Birkenfeld's three-part novel, written in 1955, "Cloud - Hurricane - Dust," which deals with dictatorship, destruction, and new beginnings. Birkenfeld was the first to powerfully narrate a coherent panorama of the period from 1933 to 1949. Günther Birkenfeld is one of the unjustly forgotten writers in Germany. No other author has depicted the German reality during National Socialism, the horrors of air warfare, the immediate post-war period, and the emerging division of Germany in such a comprehensive context so early on. It is a story about resistance and adaptation, about the ambivalent role of the Prussian nobility, about the communist underground, about the S.