Author Description

For Bernd Wagner, Europe died over the course of the 20th century. The generation that traversed it from the German Empire to post-war Germany are his "last Europeans"—not least because each of the personalities portrayed embodies a dying type of human being: the wandering monk Jürgen von der Wense, the fool from the Lower Rhine Albert Vigoleis Thelen, the Prussian Ernst von Salomon, the Hebrew Friedrich Torberg, the contentious journalist Margret Boveri, and the Kakanian and fake aristocrat Albert Paris Gütersloh. His entertaining and instructive artist portraits of these unique, yet almost forgotten, individualists create a monument and testament to a lived Europe that no longer exists in this form. A new Europe, Wagner argues, will only come about if the old one escapes oblivion.