[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Billi

And not in Germany!

But EU copyright law does incorporate the rule of the shorter term, so unless Germany has a bilateral copyright treaty with Canada (as it does with the USA), you can now legally download Canadian editions of Hesse.

Wikipedia has this to say on the matter:

In the European Union, copyrights have been harmonized amongst the member states by the EU directive 93/98/EEC on harmonising the term of copyright protection. This binding directive, which became effective on July 1, 1995, has raised the duration of copyrights throughout the union to 70 years p.m.a. It also includes in its article 7 a mandatory rule of the shorter term for works from non-EU countries. Within the EU, no comparison of terms is applied, and—as in the Berne Convention or in the UCC—existing international obligations (such as bilateral treaties) may override this rule of the shorter term. Directive 93/98/EEC was repealed and replaced by Directive 2006/116/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 December 2006 on the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights.

Germany extends the non-applicability of the rule of the shorter term to all members of the European Economic Area in §120 of its Urheberrechtsgesetz. It also does not apply the comparison of terms to U.S. works. In a case decided on October 7, 2003 by the Oberlandesgericht of Hesse in Frankfurt am Main, the court ruled that a U.S. work that had fallen in the public domain in the U.S. was still copyrighted in Germany. The court considered the rule of the shorter term inapplicable because of the bilateral copyright treaty between Germany and the United States, which had become effective on January 15, 1892 and which was still in effect. That treaty did not contain a rule of the shorter term, but just stated that works of either country were copyrighted in the other country by the other country's laws.

which would seem to suggest that the rule of the shorter term does indeed apply in Germany to Canadian works. But you would need to find an edition published by a Canadian publisher, in Canada.

EDIT: pdurrant kindly advises me that the rule of the shorter term only applies if the work is first published in the country concerned, so, although many Canadian works are indeed in the public domain in Germany due to the rule of the shorter term, Hesse probably isn't.