Dreamers
by Volker Weidermann
(Pushkin Press, £16.99)

PLATO infamously wanted to banish poets from his republic. What happens, though, when poets end up in charge of one? Volker Weidermann's Dreamers, a moving, novelistic retelling of the short-lived Bavarian Council Republic founded in 1918, provides an account of the time this briefly became a reality.

With a cast drawn from the pantheon of 20^th century German writers, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann, it brilliantly resurrects an oft-forgotten episode when poets took power and were no longer merely the ”unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Shelley once claimed.