"What is the secret of good style, how does language become literature? Michael Maar pursues this question in his main and life work, for which he has read for forty years. What is manner, what is jargon, and what error traps do almost everyone fall into? How do the elementary particles have to interact for the perfect prose sentence? Maar shows who can and cannot dialog, why Hölderlin is overestimated and Rahel Varnhagen underestimated, why a continent of style would break away without the Austrian Jews, why Kafka is an alien and why only Heimito von Doderer comes close to Thomas Mann. In fifty portraits, from Goethe to Gernhardt, from Kleist to Kronauer, he unfolds a history of German literature en passant."--