Emanuel Maess – All in all
Emanuel Maeß: All in all. Novel. Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 2023. 397 pages, 24 euros.
(Photo: Rowohlt Berlin)
Can love and sensuality contain more truth than libraries? This thought may take some getting used to for a theology student who has been working on his dissertation for half an eternity and who is leading a decelerated and carefree life with his girlfriend. But his quiet existence is suddenly interrupted when he meets the artist Katharina at a symposium. In a short time she takes the dreamy theoretician into a mystery of sensual self-loss. The new novel by Emanuel Maeß is an astonishing rarity in the current literary landscape, which is antiquated and highly modern, pious in parts, neo-Nazarenic and cheeky on top of that.
Read a detailed review here.
Virginie Despentes – Dear Asshole
Virginie Despentes: Dear asshole. Translated from the French by Ina Kronenberger and Tatjana Michaelis. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2023. 336 pages, 24 euros.
(Photo: Kiepenheuer & Witsch)
Virginie Despentes embarks on a Tour de France through the social debates and conflicts of our time: Oskar, a successful writer, has to justify himself because he aggressively hit on a publisher’s employee. To get some air, he comments on the appearance of the famous actress Rebecca, who is now in her fifties, on Instagram. She replies with the text version of a nose-breaking smack. The story is told in the form of an epistolary novel, which is only interrupted by the blog entries by Zoé – the traumatized publisher’s employee. A book about how to deal with conflicts and still keep the conversation going.
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Gabriele Tergit – The first train to Berlin
Gabriele Tergit: The first train to Berlin. Novel. Edited from the estate and with an afterword by Nicole Henneberg. Schöffling & Co, Frankfurt am Main, 2023. 208 pages, 22 euros.
(Photo: Schöffling & Co)
The young American Maud comes from the American east coast moneyed gentry and hasn’t seen much of the rest of the world. She gets the opportunity to accompany her uncle on a military mission to Berlin, which is supposed to finally bring democratic principles closer to the Germans – a welcome postponement of her marriage to a governor’s son and her form of “Grand Tour” through Europe. Gabriele Tergit paints an inimitable portrait of post-war Germany through her protagonist’s naive, distanced view of anti-Semitism, revanchism and the omnipresent defense against German guilt.
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Claudia Kemfert – shock waves
Claudia Kemfert: Shock waves. Last chance for secure energies and peace. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt 2023. 310 pages, 26 euros.
(Photo: Campus)
How did Germany actually become dependent on Russian natural gas a long time ago? Anyone who wants to be told all of this again in a well-informed manner should read the new book by energy economist Claudia Kemfert. In “Shockwaves” she meticulously traces how the German government was happy to take the cheap gas of the ruler Vladimir Putin and lived according to the motto for everything else: it will be fine. Because things didn’t go well, the Germans trembled a little before a cold winter in 2022/23. But Kemfert also makes it clear that much more needs to be done with the energy transition than sourcing natural gas elsewhere. Your clever and combative reckoning with the “fossils” shows what would really help the climate (and politics).
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Peter Longerich – The Sportpalast Speech 1943
Peter Longerich: The Sportpalast speech 1943. Goebbels and the “total war”. Siedler Verlag, Munich 2023. 208 pages, 24 euros.
(Photo: Settlers)
Times of war bring propaganda with them. It is therefore worthwhile to revisit and at the same time demythologize a kind of masterpiece of Nazi propaganda. The historian Peter Longerich has analyzed Joseph Goebbels’ infamous Sportpalast speech of February 1943 and places it in the historical context of the defeat at Stalingrad and the power struggle of various Nazi officials. When the Reich Minister of Propaganda proclaimed “total war”, he not only had the “final victory” in mind, but also his own agenda. Longerich’s commentary on the completely printed, two-hour speech is particularly impressive.
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Jerry Z. Muller – Professor of the Apocalypse
Jerry Z. Muller: Professor of the Apocalypse. The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes. Translated from English by Ursula Kömen. Jewish publisher, Berlin 2022. 927 pages, 58 euros.
(Photo: Jewish publisher)
The American historian Jerry Z. Muller unfolds the life of the Jewish religious philosopher Jacob Taubes in almost 900 pages. With infinite patience, constant friendliness and rare side swipes, Muller creates a panorama that is second to none: Taubes was an extremely complex, contradictory, ambivalent and certainly also a tragic personality. Like hardly any other contemporary thinker, he stood for the breadth of intellectual life in the 20th century. In 1966 he was appointed to the first chair in Jewish Studies at a German university by the Freie Universität Berlin. He was never an orthodox Talmudic scholar. He was fascinated by everything that was heretical and contrary to the established law.
Read a detailed review here.