Zwischen den Kriegen, zwischen den Zeilen

Felix Hartlaub officially worked as a military historian and secretly as a writer at Hitler's headquarters, the "Wolf's Lair." At the same time, he collaborated with the resistance. His literary sketches explore the question that also preoccupied him as a scholar: "How was it possible?" The military historian, writer, and contributor to the war diary of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, Felix Hartlaub, is considered by researchers to be one of the most critical observers of the "Third Reich." Literary scholars also recognize him as the most powerful, albeit largely unnoticed, literary voice of his generation. The biography traces the career of this nonconformist under the National Socialist dictatorship using handwritten sources and sheds light for the first time on the circumstances under which he "disappeared" in 1945: It examines the late Weimar Republic, the role of his father, who was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933, circles critical of the system under the dictatorship, Hartlaub's places of study, the work of an archival commission of the Foreign Office in Wehrmacht-occupied Paris, the historiography of the Second World War emerging at the Führer Headquarters "Wolf's Lair," and several resistance circles, including the "Red Orchestra" around Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen. Volume 118 of the "Publications of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences."