SIXTEEN DAYS

First English edition, first printing. Signed and inscribed by the author. Publisher's original red cloth with titles in white to the spine. A very good copy, the binding square and firm with a few small splash marks to the boards, fading to the spine and a little wear to the spine tips and corners. The contents with a touch of toning to the endpapers are otherwise clean and bright throughout.

Signed and inscribed by Hans Habe in black ink on the front free endpaper "To / Frances and Joe Gause[?] / with many thanks after a / wonderful evening – and / au revoir in Hollywood!, / Hans Habe / London, March 1948". A novel based around the events of the Munich Agreement of September 1938 by the Hungarian-American writer and newspaper publisher Hans Habe (1911-1977). Born in Budapest, Habe forged a highly successful journalistic career during his younger years, becoming, at age twenty, the youngest ever newspaper editor in Austria. An early opponent of Nazism, following the Austrian Anschluss, Habe's writings were forbidden by the new German authorities and he went into exile in France, joining the French Foreign Legion. Captured and interned in 1940, with the help of friends he escaped and immigrated to the USA in 1941. Drafted into the US Army in 1942, he was trained in psychological warfare at the Military Intelligence Training Center, and was subsequently posted to North Africa and Europe for the rest of the war, working again in newspaper publishing in the American Occupation Zone in Germany at the war's close. The present novel "takes place in the terrible weeks that led up to the Munich Agreement, that last treaty between the powers of civilisation and the powers of destruction". Describing the purpose of the work in the introduction, Habe explains that "Munich belongs to history, but it is more necessary than ever before to show that the tension of September 1938 could not have been repeated, that organized violence, feigned pacifism, and Hitlerist cunning could be endured no longer. My novel answers that it was, and remains, impossible to make peace with Hitler". An uncommon title, particularly so signed.