In 1928, someone submitted two narrative texts for the Kleist Prize competition and triumphed over well-known candidates such as Arnolt Bronnen, Lion Feuchtwanger, Marieluise Fleisser, Gustav Regler, and Hans José Rehfisch. Reviewer Hans Henny Jahnn was fascinated: A rediscovery of existence with great clarity and simplicity, where all tendencies burn in a radiant flame of humanity. The author seemed to be a man living in port cities, familiar with swaying ships and smoky pubs where sailors tell their stories. But that was far from the truth: the prizewinner was a woman who had just given birth to her second child, married to a Hungarian political emigrant, and living in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. Growing up in the Mainz dollhouse of an Orthodox Jewish art dealer family, she studied art history and sinology, sociology, and history in Heidelberg and Cologne, earning her Ph.D. with a thesis on Jews in the works of Rembrandt. Then came her first narrative attempts: about the dead on the island of Djal, about the bishop who strangles his whore and is saved by a woman—and the awarded uprising of the fishermen of St. Barbara... A path that led to world literature.