Books of the month: the SZ book tips in July – culture

Ralf Rothmann: The night under the snow

“The Night Under the Snow” is the final part of Ralf Rothmann’s trilogy, which deals with the legacy of violence and suffering after the Second World War. The protagonist of his new novel, Elisabeth Isbahner, should already be known to readers from part two. She is the only one in her family to survive the flight from the Red Army, but always carries with her the suffering resulting from the terrible experiences. With everything she’s been through, how can she still love, trust, have children with anyone? Love in times of violence is the central theme in Rothmann’s work. In his language he seeks redemption from the gray of oppressive history.

Find the full review here here.

Ilya Kaminsky: Republic of the Deaf

Occupation soldiers shoot a boy in a fictional town called Vasenka. In protest, the residents then refuse to hear the soldiers and quietly organize their uprising. The narrow cycle of poetry “Republic of Deafness” deals with the violence of an occupying power – its translation into German is published at a time when parallels to what is happening in Ukraine are obvious. What seems new to the West is painfully familiar to many Ukrainians, as well as to the Ukrainian-American writer Ilya Kaminsky. His experiences – especially with his childhood deafness – flow into his sentences, which are characterized by fragile clarity, and his direct emotional language.

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Mary Ruefle: My private collection

Mary Ruefle’s prose piece “My Private Collection” is marked by her incomparable curiosity about “what any surface holds buried beneath it.” The poet then explores this time through the character of a girl who falls in love with a shrunken head in a colonial museum. The point is how easily the truth can be overlooked if you don’t bother trying to find it. And wanting to know, for example, that the museum’s treasure “was acquired by such a vile and unspeakable malice that our heads cannot grasp it and have not a single word for it.” The translator Esther Kinsky empathizes with the poet with an intimacy that Ruefle also associates with her shrunken heads.

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Niklas Maak: Server Manifesto – Architecture of Enlightenment. Data centers as political machines

In a Virginia town of 50,000 there are hundreds of data centers and server farms. An estimated 70 percent of the global Internet volume flows through the local “Data Center Ally”. Niklas Maak’s “Server Manifesto – Architecture of Enlightenment. Data Centers as Political Machines” deals with the new centers of power and the question of whether we can be satisfied with their invisibility. After all, the data centers are “also places of precalculation, manipulation and control of the citizens”. So where is the architectural manifestation of all the accumulated sovereignty of interpretation? Among other things, Maak therefore calls for a shift in data centers from the periphery to the center of cities, as civic centers of the 21st century.

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Ulinka Rublack: The Birth of Fashion

Clothes make the man. For Ulinka Rublack, in her non-fiction book “The Birth of Fashion”, this means “that clothing makes society legible”. The beginning of fashion is discovered in the Renaissance, when the sense of time of citizens and merchants fluctuated between different world views. There was a mixture of piety and innovation: “The Europeans wanted costume happiness, but they also wanted to go to heaven,” writes Rublack. Protestant purism also met modern luxury in the cities north of the Alps. This is how the Reformation, city life and world trade created the first fashion victims. The significance of Ulinka Rublack’s finds goes far beyond the 16th and 17th centuries – and beyond the formula that clothes make the man. “The Birth of Fashion” tells of the power of the media, from Gutenberg to Instagram.

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Armin Pfahl-Traughber: Intellectual right-wing extremists. The Danger Potential of the New Right

The New Right is not simply conservative and somehow “right-wing”. They are extreme right-wing, anti-pluralistic, authoritarian, dictatorial. This is the conclusion of extremism researcher Armin Pfahl-Traughber. And he came to a clear conclusion: the masterminds of the New Right, who pose as the intellectual avant-garde, are intellectual low-flyers! Why? “The authors of the New Right are not only unable to justify what ‘being German’ is and means, they can’t even describe it.” Of course, all this does not mean that one should underestimate these people, quite the opposite. An in-depth analysis: short, clear and precise.

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