Elisabeth Lauffer

"Set against the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963... [this] is a harrowing yet ultimately uplifting coming-of-age story about a young female translator--caught between societal and familial expectations and her unique ability to speak truth to power--as she fights to expose the dark truths of her nation's past. For twenty-four-year-old Eva Bruhns, World War II is a foggy childhood memory. At the war's end, Frankfurt was a smoldering ruin, severely...

October 16, 1943, inside the Vatican as darkness descends upon Rome. Having been alerted to the Nazi plan to round up the city's Jewish population the next day, Monsignor F. dispatches an envoy to a nearby palazzo to bring Ludwig Pollak and his family to safety within the papal premises. But Pollak shows himself in no hurry to leave his home and accept the eleventh-hour offer of refuge. Pollak's visitor is obliged to take a seat and listen as he recounts...

"The Piano Student centers on an affair between one of the 20th century's most celebrated pianists, Vladimir Horowitz, and his young male student, Nico Kaufmann, in the late 1930s. As Europe hurtles toward political catastrophe and Horowitz ascends to the pinnacle of artistic achievement, the great pianist hides his illicit love from his wife Wanda, the daughter of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini. The affair is narrated by Kaufmann in the...

"For more than five decades, Bernd (1931-2007) and Hilla (1934-2015) Becher collaborated on extraordinary photographs of industrial architecture in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States. This sweeping monograph features 150 of the Bechers' quintessential pictures of water towers, gas tanks, and blast furnaces that became sculptural objects through their lens and presentation methods. Also included are little-known...