Die Ballade vom Armen Jakob is the play which Elias wrote in blank verse while in internment on the Isle of Man in 1940. Previously it was published only in the collection of Elias's poems, Los der Menschen, which Suhrkamp published to mark his ninetieth birthday in 1987. Now Insel Verlag have issued it on its own, as a handsome little hardback book with a foreword by Hermann Korte and with striking illustrations by the prominent German artist and cartoonist Karl-Georg Hirsch.

source: Figurations no. 7 (Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation)