Editing Hildegard Knef (section)

==Publications==
[[File:Knef 1995.jpg|thumb|Knef, aged 69, at her last concert (5 March 1995) in Berlin]]
Her autobiography ''Der geschenkte Gaul: Bericht aus einem Leben'' (''The Gift Horse: Report on a Life'', 1970) was a candid recount of her life in Germany during and after the [[Second World War]], and reportedly became the best-selling German book in the post-war years. Her second book ''Das Urteil'' (''The Verdict'', 1975) was a moderate success, and dealt with her struggle with [[breast cancer]]. Knef not only achieved international best-seller status, her books were also widely praised by critics because her autobiographies were "better-than-the-average celebrity's".

In ''The Gift Horse: Report on a Life'' Knef recounted her childhood and difficult life being an actress and singer while living in [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler's]] Berlin and after the war in Europe and America. Arthur Cooper of ''[[Newsweek]]'' called it "a bitterly honest book and a very good one".<ref name=Gale /> The book doesn't try to persuade the public, depicting a made-up celebrity's adventures, but truthfully recounts her struggles as a German woman who grew up in Berlin under the [[Nazis]].''The Gift Horse: Report on a Life'' was translated to English by Knef's second husband, David Anthony Palastanga.<ref name="Germany's War-Scarred Beauty" />

In ''The Verdict'', which was also translated by Palastanga, Knef looked at her life from another perspective, because she knew that she had cancer. Rachel MacKenzie wrote that Knef had her 56th operation, a mastectomy, in [[Salzburg]] on 10 August 1973. MacKenzie stated that from that cancer surgery, life had to be thought of in terms of pre-verdict and post-verdict. The book is divided in these two sections but they are not chronologically ordered because Knef wrote the two sections in a way that the reader is moved forward and backward in time and space. ''The Verdict'' describes in great detail the hospital scenes as well as the doctors and nurses in [[New York City|New York]], [[Los Angeles]], [[Zürich]] and [[Hamburg]], where she was hospitalised.<ref name="The Verdict">{{cite news|last=MacKenzie|first=Rachel|title= Concerning pain and beauty: The Verdict | newspaper = New York Times | date = 25 January 1976 | url = https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/25/archives/concerning-pain-and-beauty-the-verdict.html | page = 264 | access-date = 2 February 2024}}</ref>