When it was first announced several people here expressed interest about the German Shadowrun - Die 6. Welt (aka the "SR Worldbook") so I thought I'd share some information.

SR6W is a 21x14cm (8.27x5.51") sized paperback book containing 512 pages (16 full-color). The list of contributors (authors and illustrators) is too long to repeat it here.

I'll now give a synopsis of the chapters, translating the titles when necessary:

Inhalt (Table of contents) - p6
Take a guess

Vorworte (Forewords) - p7
Tobias Hamelmann talks about his personal SR history while Christian Lonsing explains what RPGs in general and SR especially mean to him.

Shadowrun - ein Phänomen (Shadowrun - a phenomenon) - p12
Reflections on SR's target audience, realism and the relations between in-game and IRL world and history.

Kurzgeschichte: Erwachen (Short story: Awakening) - p23
Holly Brighton's recollection of the day she met Dunkelzahn. (Sidenote: We learn that Holly had a daughter named Annabell who was born a dwarf.)

Shadowrun vs Cyberpunk - p44
What is Cyberpunk - and is Shadowrun Cyberpunk?

Der Zahn der Zeit (The ravages of time) - p51
The complete SR timeline up to 2064 (including information about South America taken from SoLA).

Kurzgeschichte: Kabale (Short story: Cabal) - p121
Hedwig Gabler, leader of the German Grand Badisch Crusade terrorist group, is taken to Liechtenstein where she meets a political figure of the past she'd never have expected to be still alive - Alfons Hunggarten, once chancellor of the South German League (2038-2044), who explains his unbelievable plans to her.

Die Hintermänner (Those behind the scenes) - p134
FASA and Fantasy Productions.

Interview I - p140
L. Ross Babcock III and David Charles Wylie talk about SR.

Access All Areas - p144
Peer Bieber and Tobias Wolter tell how they turned from fans to freelancers and explain how an idea becomes a book - using SoE as an example.

Interview II - p165
Christian Lonsing talks about SR4 and the decisions that led to the new edition.

Kurzgeschichte: Der Echtleder-Koffer (Short story: The real-leather suitcase) - p169
In the latest session of their favority virtual reality game teens Tom and Max discover an object that should not be there - and suddenly a heavily-armed elf stands in their room and demands the game chip...

Shadowrun - das Rollenspiel (Shadowrun - the role-playing game) - p176
An overview of RPGs in general and the various SR editions.

Kuriositätenkabinett (Freak show) - p186
Freak (and fun) characters (from deliberate powergaming to rule misunderstandings) encountered at conventions.

Mächte der Sechsten Welt (Powers of the Sixth World) - p188
Dragons, corporations, magic, matrix, political powers, religion, immortal elves, underworld.

Earthdawn - die Welt davor (Earthdawn - the world that came before) - p248
A rundown of ED - history of the game, description of the game world, connections to SR (ends with an explanation of what Proteus was originally meant to be before the ED/SR crossover storyline was buried).

Kurzgeschichte: Ein Sack voll Glück(Short story: A bag full of luck) - p259
Two garbage collectors find and keep a suitcase full of money, unaware they disrupted a blackmail payment and have two runners on their tail...

Who is who - p280
Personal profiles of various people involved in SR.

Interview III - p300
Lars Blumenstein, Tobias Hamelmann and Tobias Wolter talk about the German SR crew and give a brief glimpse of future projects (new-style citybooks called "Hot Spots" and a new German adventure campaign centered on the 2064-2070 events from an AGS point of view).

Farbseiten (Color pages) - p305
Various color plates from SR1-SR3 (including the North American country flags, the coats-of-arms of the AGS states and even one of the photograph illustration from London Sourcebook).

Kampf der Editionen (Battle of the editions) - p321
Four rounds of SR combat told rules-wise - one round for each SR edition.

Kurzgeschichte: Zum Wohle der Forschung (Short story: For the sake of research) - p349
The voluntary extraction of a genetics researcher and her motives for doing so.

Ware 101 - p361
Thoughts about SR cyberware - what is it, why is it used, how do cloning or a DNI work?

Schonungslos (Pitiless) - p368
Freak stuff, glitches, mistranslations, miscommunications between FanPro and FASA (resulting in canon deviances), strange rules, trivia.

Rhein-Ruhr-Newsfax (Rhine-Ruhr-Newsfax) - p377
Ingame news dated April 2, 2064 (among them speculations about the Novatech IPO and the death of Cardinal Heeremann, de facto leader of the theocratic AGS state Westphalia).

Kurzgeschichte: Resurrection (Short story: Resurrection) - p382
Anna, a young wife and mother, works tirelessly for the German Liberal Democratic Federalistic Party - to the point where her family breaks up and she recognizes her ambitions and goals to be just illusions.
When the Crash 2.0 sends her into a nine-day coma she awakes to discover strange new abilities - she can feel the cyberspace around her, see data in ways never thought of before and doesn't need a cyberterminal anymore...
(Unfortunately, due to an editing error the end of the story is missing. The full text can be downloaded as a PDF here.)

Produkte (Products) - p398
All SR products ever produced (not including SoA and even more recent stuff) - game books (including those from France, Hungary and Japan), novels (English and German), mangas, TCG, miniatures, magazines and merchandise.

Zum Ende (Closing words) - p470
Lars Blumenstein talks about the SR future: 4th Edition.

Glossar (Glossary) - p472
A glossary of SR terminology - with ingame comments by a runner called Zwieblblootz.

Anhänge (Appendices) - p487
Comparison charts of dice roll success probabilities in SR3 and SR4, maps of Europe, the AGS and Seattle, corporate logos, metahuman illustrations and various German SR ID cards given away as goodies at conventions.

I hope you appreciate my overview.
It is a really nice book, full of information and nice tidbits - of course, you must be able to read and understand German...

(The chapter showing the different combat rules from SR1-SR4 working side by side is one of my favorites.)

Gee, no one outside of Germany could ever want what's in there.

Cripes. Even I want this book.

Sounds great. A bit cruel to release it in German only. At least for people not speaking German.

Ist das schon draußen?

God dammit. That sounds like ~500 pages of paper awesome, and so, naturally, it's unavaiable to most of the fucking world.

*sigh* Thanks for the breakdown, but it just pisses me off I can't get it.

What's with editing? Is it as poorly done as the last FanPro german books?

Bleh I was hoping I would be forced to use my German ever again! Guess it is time to pull out the old lacking language skills and worm eaten dictionaries just to get through this one, but I'm sure it will be well worth it!

What was the reason for not printing the whole story?

Let's just face it. The quality of the Germany-only SR publications has never been very high. I just hated Chrom und Dioxin and Walzer, Punks und schwarzes ICE. And I am ignoring most of the content of Deutschland in den Schatten II.

B:ADL had some nice ideas, but also a lot of crap (Berlin *cough*).

But the worst thing is the fact that the german translations of the last SR-books (including the very important SR4 rulebook) had been done really bad.

The first printing of SR3.01D wasn't any better.

But the german versions of CC, M&M and MitS had been nice and offered some extras compared with the english versions. But after that (and Crazy leaving FanPro) the quality became worse and worse.

That's true. Shadowrun without Crazy isn't the same.

I wanna know the story behind Proteus!

Ah ... much obliged.

Oh, I understand that. I was just curious about the original intentions, as I'm a relatively big fan of The Metaplot™.

Please forgive me if I'm wrong, but can't most Germans read English?

According this about 1/2 of Germans can speak English, though that's somewhat different than reading and includes people with only basic conversational skill.

Damn, that's not very special at all.

Nearly every German under the age of 50 speaks English. Not necessarily good English, but...

So maybe my very drunk friend, on a business trip, might have been able to get by with simple English rather than blurting in an alcohol amplified tone "Atchung! Schnitzel!" to get the cab driver to take him to a restaurant?

Aren't tourists great?

@Mystic: Your assumption regarding information from SoLA included in "Die sechste Welt" is corect. At time of writing "DsW" SoLA was still up for in print release, IIRC.

Urge to kill... Rising.

I'd kill for this book in English. Sounds very cool.

You need to add solar panels.