Notes from Fuhrer HQ by Felix Hartlaub

Fascinating, eerily poetic dispatches from inside Hitler’s war machine, translated into English for the first time, from a mysterious and tragic figure in German literature.

Felix Hartlaub is one of the most enigmatic figures of 20th-century German literature. As a young writer of blazing promise, he 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 during the war.

From 1941, Hartlaub was posted in various Nazi military command headquarters, a historian tasked with writing the Wehrmacht’s official and up-to-the-minute 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 micro-climate of a command train, these dispatches conjure the absurdity and turmoil of life within Hitler’s war machine. Soldiers peacock in the late summer heat, trading intel on the local women; officials have guarded conversations in an atmosphere of suffocating anxiety; as the command train hurtles through a chaotic Germany, its shadowy compartments are the scene of booze-fueled assignations.

Full of vivid insights and unsettling plays with tone and perspective, Notes from Führer HQ reveals the nightmare of daily life in Nazi headquarters through the eyes of a remarkably perceptive, disabused observer.