Italian writer Claudio Magris has been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of the country's most prestigious literary prizes. It is given annually for the efforts of artists and scholars to overcome hatred.

Novelist, essayist and poet Herta Müller has won the 2009 Nobel prize for literature. Judges praised her for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose".

Three days after the fall of France in 1940, Napoleon, lying in his marble tomb in Paris, received a visit from his greatest admirer. Adolf Hitler, on his one and only visit to the French capital, made an unannounced trip to the tomb in Les Invalides.

Don Heinrich Tolzmann, German Americana. Selected Essays. Milford , Ohio : Little Miami Publishing, 2009. 300 pages. $ 22.50 plus $3.00 shipping.

By Gert Niers

Austrian historian Silvin Eiletz' book on former Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito has been published in Croatia. I reveals how Tito really took power.

Oprah Winfrey hailed it as "the single greatest love story" she had heard in two decades in television - a heart-rending tale of the Holocaust. I turned out to be a hoax.

Three days after the fall of France in 1940, Napoleon, lying in his marble tomb in Paris, received a visit from his greatest admirer. Adolf Hitler, on his one and only visit to the French capital, made an unannounced trip to the tomb in Les Invalides.

By Christopher Hudson

Controversial British war historian David Irving, fresh from thirteen months in an Austrian prison, is testing America’s dedication to First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The US passed the test.

Most accounts of the invasion and occupation of Germany and Austria in 1945 paint a broadly peace ful picture of the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the Allied-run west of the countries.

Patrick J. Buchanan ascribes “colossal blunders” to British wartime leader Winston Churchill, who, he says, “turned two European wars into world wars that may yet prove the "mortal wounds of the West.”