Joseph Roth, Radetzky March. Ambivalent longing for order

About the book
What do Laozi, Hildegard von Bingen, Montaigne, Marx, Freya von Moltke and Bruno Latour have in common? They all wrote books that you should take with you on your journey into the future. In this volume, over a hundred authors answer the question of which book points to the future in a particular way by presenting it in a concise and entertaining way. The result is a fascinating virtual “library of the future” with well-known classics and new works to be discovered, inviting you to browse, read, reflect and take courageous action for a better future.

“If you want to read the future, you have to leaf through the past.” André Malraux’s famous sentence is to be understood quite literally here as an invitation to leaf through books of the past in order to read the future. In this volume, over a hundred authors present outstanding books that open up perspectives for tomorrow in different ways: by imagining a dark future, as George Orwell does in 1984, by pointing out past dangers that will also be virulent in the future, as Hannah Arendt does in Elements and Origins of Totalitarianism, or by creating versions of the future that turn out to be a critique of the present, as Louis-Sébastien Mercier does in The Year 2440. Above all, however, it is about groundbreaking books that help us to think, dream and shape a different, better world with their clever thoughts, apt observations and stylistic brilliance.