What is the secret of good style, and how does language become literature? Michael Maar explores this question in his main and lifelong work, which he has been reading for forty years. What is mannerism, what is jargon, and what pitfalls do almost everyone fall into? How must the elementary particles interact for the perfect prose sentence? Maar reveals who can write dialogues and who cannot, why Hölderlin is overrated and Rahel Varnhagen is underrated, why a continent of style would collapse without the Austrian Jews, why Kafka is an alien, and why only Heimito von Doderer comes close to Thomas Mann. In fifty portraits, from Goethe to Gernhardt, from Kleist to Kronauer, he unfolds, in passing, a history of German literature.