This book comprises two novels by the celebrated twentieth-century German author Gerhard Kopf: his first novel, Innerfar, and Bluff, or the Southern Cross. The first of these celebrates in fictional form the life and destiny of the hostess of the first meeting of the German literary Group 47, now fifty years old, which set an enduring stamp on the development of post-War German literature. Containing many of the themes to be developed in Kopf's later fiction, the book is a search for identity through memory and storytelling. Bluff is a simple story of the search for liberation and the unshackling of the imagination, of dreaming of far-away places, and the friendship between two boys, one from the East and the other from West Germany.
GERHARD KOPF was born in 1948 in Pfronten/Algau, southern Bavaria; he is the author of numerous essays, stories, and plays for the stage and radio, as well as a number of novels. LESLIE WILLSON is a member of the New York P.E.N. Center and the Mainz Academy of the Sciences and of Literature.