In contrast to his famous "Galeerentagebuch," which is a composition of decades-long records during his inner emigration in socialist Hungary, the late diaries presented here by Imre Kertész are an unedited, originally private "journal intime" of surprising and often disturbing openness. They cover the years of his outer emigration - the detachment from Hungary, whose post-socialist development increasingly reminds him of pre-fascist times, and his settlement in his chosen home of Berlin, where he was struck in 2002 by the "happy catastrophe" of the Nobel Prize. After decades of extreme limitation, he certainly knows how to enjoy this "rare gift of a good life" - exclusive restaurants in Berlin, Paris, and New York, or the luxury hotels of Gstaad and Ma.