New edition, with an introduction by Iain Bamforth and afterword by Jurgen Putz.
The surprise could not have been greater when, in the autumn of 1953, a completely unknown author mounted the German literary stage and presented a 1,000-page book. This fellow was already fifty years old, and he arrived on the scene with multifarious life experiences, accumulated in no less than five different countries. He was German, but he lived in Amsterdam. In addition to his mother tongue, he was fluent in five other languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English.
