The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters

'At three in the morning I crept out of Carlsbad, they wouldn't have let me go if I hadn't. I wasn't going to be stopped, for it was time.'

This is the authentic day-to-day record never before translated, of the first eight weeks of freedom as Germany's greatest poet heads for the Italy he has been yearning to see since childhood. Leaving behind the growing frustrations of administrative work, a difficult love-affair, and lack of time to write, he discovers himself again as a sensuous being ...