The German Library

The German Library series is unique for presenting an entire foreign culture to the English speaking world, from 800 A.D. to the present. It includes not only works of literature in translation, but also philosophy, history, the visual and performing arts, the sciences, the social sciences, psychology, and religion.

The quality and range of The German Library are without parallel, as attested by notices in the Washington Post Book World ("distinguished"), Booklist ("important"), Choice ("outstanding translations"), Unterrichtspraxis ("reliable"), and elsewhere.

The German Library was conceived in 1980 by Volkmar Sander, Erich Maria Remarque Professor Emeritus of German at NYU and founder of the Deutsches Haus at NYU, and Werner Mark Linz, founder and president of the Continuum Publishing Company. The first ten volumes were issued in 1982.

The German Library encompasses German, Austrian, and Swiss authors, essayists, and thinkers. Altogether, nearly 1,000 figures are included, from Wolfram von Eschenbach and Hildegard of Bingen to Heinrich Böll, and in between Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Heine, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Rilke, Nietzsche, Büchner, Schnitzler, Marx, Kraus, Kafka, Musil, Freud, Horkheimer, Adorno, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, Hochhuth, Frisch, Timm, and Bernhard.

Many of The German Library volumes feature introductions by internationally renowned figures such as Günter Grass, E. L. Doctorow, John Irving, Hannah Arendt, Max Frisch, Alfred Kazin, Peter Gay, Joel Agee, Harold Bloom, John Simon, Howard Nemerov, and René Wellek. Among the editors of individual books are scholars such as Peter Demetz (Yale), Sander L. Gilman (Chicago), Reinhold Grimm (California), Victor Lange (Princeton), Wolfgang Schirmacher (The European Graduate School) and A. Leslie Willson (Texas).

Seventeen Nobel Prize winners are published in The German Library, both in literature and the sciences, among them Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Nelly Sachs, Elias Canetti, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Elfriede Jelinek (in Contemporary Austrian Writings), Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Schweitzer.

The German Library has been supported from the beginning by the Deutsches Haus at New York University, Inter Nationes in Bonn, private agencies and corporations, as well as Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft. In 2007, Continuum and Deutsches Haus celebrated the completion of the library with the publication of the 100th volume.

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