Never Meet Again

In a triumphant future Germany, Professor Kempfer has spent fifteen years hiding a secret: while the empire celebrates peace and prosperity, he has been building a forbidden machine in his basement, driven by grief over his wife Marthe's death and a corrosive sense of moral betrayal. When his colleague Georg Tanzler urges him to accept the new age, Kempfer's bitterness erupts, and he abandons the façade of obedience for a decisive act of scientific defiance. His experiment hurls him into Berlin, but not the world he expected. The city is scarred, divided between Soviet and American occupation, and hostile to his every assumption. Exhausted and disoriented, he survives only by recognizing Marthe alive in this altered reality, where Germany has lost the war and history has taken a radically different path. Yet reunion brings no peace. Colonel Lubintsev, a cheerful official of the new regime, reveals that Kempfer has been anticipated and that his device may serve state ambitions. As Marthe embraces the possibilities of this world and Tanzler rejoins the scene with eager admiration, Kempfer is left stranded between grief, science, and political exploitation, facing a future as unsettling as the one he fled. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.