Notes from Führer HQ

Unflinching, eerily poetic dispatches from inside Hitler's war machine, from a mysterious and tragic figure in German literature

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. In private, he wrote the disaffected, ruthlessly clear-eyed and often beautiful fragments that make up Notes from Führer HQ, now translated into English for the first time by the acclaimed Michael Hofmann.

Moving from a strangely bucolic barracks in Ukraine to tense bureaucratic headquarters on the Eastern Front to the bizarre, seedy micro-climate of a command train, these dispatches conjure the absurdity and turmoil of life within Hitler's war machine through the eyes of a remarkably perceptive, disabused observer.