Author: Lion Feuchtwanger

Lion Feuchtwanger, 1884-1958, was a novelist and a citizen of the world. His novels reached millions in sales and have been published in over 20 languages. When Lion Feuchtwanger passed away at the age of 74, he was regarded as one of the most significant writers in the German language. His life journey from Munich to Berlin, his extensive travels to Africa, his exile in the French Sanary-sur-Mer, and in California's Pacific Palisades led the writer, whose tireless creative energy was admired even by his neighbor in California, Thomas Mann, to an unusually broad knowledge and cultural-historical understanding. 15 novels, as well as plays, short stories, reports, sketches, critiques, and reviews, matured the friend and collaborator of Bertolt Brecht into the "master of historical and contemporary novels" (Wilhelm von Sternburg). With his "Waiting Room Trilogy," the Enlightenment humanist proved to be a perceptive chronicler of Nazi Germany.

Afterword by: Fritz Rudolf Fries

Fritz Rudolf Fries was born in 1935 in Bilbao (Spain), where he grew up, as well as in Leipzig. From 1953 to 1958, he studied Romance languages in Leipzig, worked as an interpreter and translator from Spanish and French from 1958 to 1960, and was a research assistant at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin from 1960 to 1966. Since 1966, he has lived in Petershagen near Berlin. He is a member of P.E.N. (East), the Academy of Arts in Berlin, and the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt. Among other honors, he received the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen and the Brandenburg Literature Prize in 1991.