Onkel Tom's Hütte: Oder Die Geschichte Eines Christlichen Sklaven. Band 1 (von 3).

This is the novel that Abraham Lincoln allegedly said started the Civil War. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, and it became the best-selling novel of the 19th century, selling 300,000 copies in America alone in its first year. The story follows Uncle Tom, a devoutly Christian enslaved man, as he is sold away from his kind master and subjected to increasingly brutal owners. Meanwhile, Eliza, a mother enslaved on the same plantation, makes her desperate escape across the ice-choled Ohio River with her young son. The novel interweaves multiple storylines to show the varied cruelties of American slavery, the tearing apart of families, and the moral bankruptcy of a system that treats human beings as property. It is a work of immense historical power and considerable controversy. While it galvanized Northern sentiment against slavery and remains a landmark of abolitionist literature, later generations have criticized its portrayal of enslaved people and the stereotypes that calcified in adaptations. The book asks readers to consider how literature can fight injustice while also perpetuating the very prejudices it seeks to erase.