Felix Hartlaub

As a young writer of blazing promise, Felix Hartlaub went missing in the final days of the Second World War, leaving behind diaries, notes and incomplete drafts that provide a singularly evocative portrait of life in wartime. From 1941, Hartlaub was posted in various Nazi military command headquarters, a historian tasked with writing the Wehrmacht's official record of the war....

The writer Felix Hartlaub died in obscurity at just 31, vanishing from Berlin in 1945. He left behind a small oeuvre of private writings from the Second World War: fragments and observations of life from the midst of catastrophe that, with their evocative power and precision, would make a permanent place for him in German letters. Posted to Paris in...