Dorothee Schmitz-Köster – Useless Fathers, Wallstein
Dorothee Schmitz-Köster: Useless fathers. About model men, side jumpers and fleeing producers in Lebensborn. Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2022. 160 pages, 24 euros.
(Photo: Wallstein)
It was a men’s league after Heinrich Himmler’s taste. The SS association “Lebensborn” aimed to produce “racially and genetically valuable” children, thousands were conceived and raised in specially built “Lebensborn” homes. The fathers often remained anonymous and did not bother with their offspring. The historian Dorothee Schmitz-Köster has traced the fates of countless “Lebensborn” children and explains in a sensitive way how this male-dominated strategy burdens the children from then to now.
Read a detailed review here.
Bruno Latour – On the emergence of an ecological class. A memorandum, Suhrkamp
Bruno Latour: On the emergence of an ecological class. A memorandum. Suhrkamp, Berlin 2022. 93 pages, 14 euros.
(Photo: Suhrkamp)
Bruno Latour’s new memorandum “On the Emergence of an Ecological Class” is dedicated to the question of how lethargy can continue to prevail in the face of the existential threat posed by climate change – politically and privately. Latour addresses both politics and the general public, which he sees as indifferent. How can the dominant doing nothing be turned into constructive mobilization? This is the subject of the small volume that appeared in German translation a few weeks after Latour’s death.
Read a detailed review here.
Cormac McCarthy – The Passenger, Stella Maris, Rowohlt
Cormac McCarthy: The Passenger. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2022. 528 pages, 28 euros.
(Photo: Rowohlt Verlag)
Cormac McCarthy: Stella Maris. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2022. 240 pages, 24 euros.
(Photo: Rowohlt Verlag)
Sixteen years ago, Cormac McCarthy wrote “The Road”, a novel that became an international success. And then there was no new novel for more than a decade, until recently: Two appeared at the same time. They are about the siblings Robert and Alicia Western. In the first book “The Passenger”, Robert, as a salvage diver, sees something he shouldn’t have seen, is followed and bugged. So the first book reads like a thriller, while the second is pure existentialism. Alicia is admitted to the Stella Maris Mental Hospital. In this book, McCarthy frees himself from all narrative constraints, and through the character Alicia also discusses mathematical theories without having to translate them into the dramaturgy of the novel.
Read a detailed review here.
Lukas Bärfuss – Father’s box, Rowohlt
Lukas Bärfuss: Father’s box. A story about inheritance. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2022. 96 pages, 18 euros.
(Photo: Rowohlt Verlag)
At the beginning there is a banana box. It was presented to the author Lukas Bärfuss after the death of his father. He locked the box away for many years and now, after opening it, has extracted an essay from it: “Father’s Box”. Its content bears witness to a lonely death as a homeless person, to a life of poverty and crime into which the author almost slipped himself. However, he himself has worked his way out of homelessness and a lack of education, has become a writer and university lecturer, and was honored with the Georg Büchner Prize in 2019. In his autobiographical essay, he develops a dramaturgical guideline for thinking in context.
Read a detailed review here.
Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch – We didn’t do well. The correspondence, Piper-Verlag
Ingeborg Bachmann/Max Frisch: “We didn’t do well.” The correspondence. Piper Verlag, Munich and Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2022. 1038 pages, 40 euros. (Photo: Piper Verlag)
(Photo: Bachmann)
The relationship between Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch has always kept literary scholars in suspense. The excitement was correspondingly great when the exchange of letters between the two writers, who were influential in post-war literature, could finally be published. The couple’s writings reveal how strained the relationship was from the start. That Frisch felt intellectually inferior to Bachmann, felt jealousy in several respects, as a writer and as a life partner. Bachmann, on the other hand, remains difficult to grasp, she eludes – the relationship and the reader. She, the self-determined writer, suffers from Frisch’s male supremacy.
Read a detailed review here.
Christian Grataloup – The History of the World. An Atlas, CH Beck
Christian Grataloup: The history of the world. an atlas. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2022. 640 pages, 39.95 euros.
(Photo: Verlag CH Beck)
The history of mankind in atlas format? That’s fine. Christian Gataloup has managed the global interplay of history and geography in an impressive way. Regardless of whether he explains the course of the plague in the late Middle Ages on a double page, explains colonized Africa or the Six Day War in the Middle East (1967), it is always a vividly produced retrospective with a gain in knowledge. The great lines of global history in 515 maps.
Read a detailed review here.