Born in Berlin in 1938, Michael Buselmeier grew up in Heidelberg in southern Germany. After school he trained and worked as an actor and assistant theatre director, before studying German and Art History in Heidelberg. He financed his early career as a writer with various university lecturing jobs, during a phase in which he founded – and wrote for – an alternative newspaper for Heidelberg, the ‘Communale’, a paper with communitarian, environmentalist roots. Eight books of poetry and fifteen longer prose works followed in a career still going strong in 2012, when the poetry volume Dante Deutsch was published to glowing reviews. The critic in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praised him as a ”miraculous sponge of what he sees, who reflects this with photographic, lyrical precision”; and someone who wants to use this talent to comment on our “stuffed-with-atrocity” world. Many motifs found in Dante Deutsch can also be found in The Fall of Heidelberg, the 1981 novel excerpted in No Man’s Land. Running from: Wehrmacht soldiers seen left hanging in the trees as a child in 1945; through the annual ritualistic Corpus Christi procession in his home town; through to young German students derailed to the point of madness by their political fanaticism; Buselmeier has gone on writing about subjects that can intrigue, trouble and provoke us. (2013)