We are a generation without farewell, says the German writer Wolfgang Borchert, summarizing the tragedy of his generation that was led into World War II without anyone saying goodbye to it. Perhaps Borchert is the voice most capable of expressing this generation, and that war that left massive material and spiritual devastation in Germany. It also left literary ruin. Borchert left a collection of short stories that his fellow Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Heinrich Böll, describes as "complete masterpieces," while Egyptian writer Ibrahim Aslan sees in his stories "a sublime expression of the ferocity of all wars without a single direct word." In this book, we present to the reader a selection of these stories, and what attracted us to them is the human treatment of major topics, such as war and death, love and the feeling of loss, and the artistic expression of them.
