Der Riss der Zeit geht durch mein Herz. Erinnerungen

“The rift of time goes through my heart” is a Heinrich Heine quote that accompanied Hertha Pauli on her long escape route via Zurich, Paris, Marseille and Lisbon to the USA. She did not walk this path alone, but with friends whose names today sound like a who’s who of German-speaking émigrés: Joseph Roth, Walter Mehring, Franz and Alma Werfel and, above all, Ödön von Horváth, to whom she dedicates one of the most beautiful chapters of this wonderful and long-forgotten memoir. In her later years, Hertha Pauli regularly went back and forth between her new home in New York and the city of her birth. She had become a witness of the times, a time that today characterises European culture and indeed our entire lives.

With an epilogue by Karl-Markus Gauss