As the title indicates, this is a contrastive study of hypothetical and conditional statements in German and Arabic.

There are two ways of reading it in my mind:
1. You can read it as a linguist, and concentrate on the more general conceptual-theoretical debates, or
2. You can skip over some of the headier stuff and read mostly the examples in order to improve your German and/or your Arabic in a practical way.

I have done both and it has been very helpful, all the more so since a lot of German native speakers make mistakes with conditionals and reported speech..

Here is the catch: Practically all of his sources were originally written in German. They include government brochures, a book about Islam written for German converts, and translations of famous novels by Guenther Grass and Christa Wolf. At first, I was very disappointed by this, but then I realized it allowed me to practice precision when translating from German into Arabic.

The sources are included in the back in German and Arabic, and the examples are quite copious, encompassing about 70 pages.

And since we are talking about "irreality" here, the image above comes from a very sad and beautiful movie by Fassbinder.