Julian Preece is the author (with Waldemar Lotnik) of "Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands" (1999) and the editor of the "Cambridge Companion to Kafka" (2002).

This book traces the career of the most widely read and influential German novelist in the second half of the Twentieth-century. It shows in particular how his experiences as a teenage Nazi shaped his thinking, both in his novels and his role as critic and campaigner, from The Tin Drum (1959), his most famous novel, to My Century (1999), from his public protest against the building of the Berlin Wall (1961) to his diatribes against Helmut Kohl in the late 1990s. This new paperback edition includes new material on his last two books, My Century and Crabwalk including a revised Bibliography and Chronology.