Short Stories by Werner Bergengruen

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Short Stories by Werner Bergengruen is written by Albrecht Classen and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1527569667 (ISBN 10) and 9781527569669 (ISBN 13).

Long ignored, the fascinating Baltic-German author Werner Bergengruen (d. 1964), once even nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, is reintroduced here through the English translation of a selection of his best short stories. The bulk of the book consists of his Death from Reval (1939), in which we are confronted with a variety of perspectives on death as intertwined with people’s lives in that Estonian city. We are invited to follow curious habits and attitudes by various survivors and thus learn to smile about and with death. In other novellas chosen from his extensive œuvre, Bergengruen offers thought-provoking and intriguing accounts about events in the Middle Ages and the early modern age concerning honor, love, freedom, marriage, power, and the importance of humility particularly in politics. Bergengruen emerges as an excellent observer of people’s values and ideals, shortcomings and failures, as his short stories provide timeless messages relevant for our lives, often couched in historical settings.