Navid Kermani: Everyone should come a step closer from where they are. questions about God.
Dad, explain Islam to me. And Navid Kermani does. Describes the Islam in which he grew up to his daughter, who is growing up in Catholic Cologne, and explains to her that a God who is “greater” is always above the narrow-minded interpretations of fundamentalists. Kermani shows himself as a believer and yet a thinker, as someone who interprets his religion in a contemporary way. Gustav Seibt calls the book, which he reviewed for the SZ, an “intimate, informal religious instruction for a very modern girl.” Here his meeting.
Michael Wildt: “Shattered Time”
The historian Michael Wildt is one of the best experts on Nazi history in Germany. Now he has one magnum opus about the 30 years between the revolution of 1918 and the collapse of the Nazi state in 1945. He is not concerned with a smooth master narrative, but with the perspective and feelings of his contemporaries. With the help of diaries of well-known and little-known people, Wildt succeeds in conveying a feeling for the openness of historical processes and experiences, for ruptures and contradictions. A grandiose “history from below” about the age of extremes, interwoven with the broad lines of politics.
You can find a detailed discussion here here.
Yasmina Reza: Serge
“Serge” is completely different: “Is that allowed?” some people think and others ask out loud when they read a short summary of Yasmina Reza’s novel: The Popper siblings, descendants of Holocaust survivors, go to Auschwitz and have a hard time there , something to feel, stumble across the site. And although “Serge” is sometimes hilarious, the Paris-born author does not want her novel to be understood as a comedy, and certainly not as “a comedy about Auschwitz,” as she says in the SZ interview with Johanna Adorján. Then what is it? “A masterpiece!” Says SZ author Nils Minkmar.
Here one Conversation with the author – and here the review of the novel.
Abbas Khider: The memory falsifier
If Abbas Khider had his way, some things could be simpler. German, for example. Years ago, an author living in Berlin made a proposal for the radical simplification of the German language. Khider, who comes from Iraq, knows from his own biography how complicated German immigration law is – and Said, the protagonist of his new novel, who is fighting a tough fight for naturalization in the German capital, knows it too. Said fights just as tough with his memories – he suffers from memory lapses and simply thinks up parts of his biography with the doctor treating him. In a way, it’s also a simple solution – one that Khider sometimes writes down documentary, sometimes poetically. And sometimes funny too, like when Said talks to a Nazi in a bar. How is that possible? “Laughing is a strategic decision, not a tactical one,” says Khider in one during a meeting with SZ editor Sonja Zekri, “I want to live. I want to be 100 years old.”
Niall Ferguson’s “Doom”
Many are already despairing of mankind’s ability to learn – at the moment, for example, it is as fascinating as it is frustrating to look at historical reports Reading through vaccinations and their opponents, such as in the case of smallpox At the end of the 19th century (spoiler: the otherwise enlightened Scandinavians in Stockholm, for example, were hit particularly hard by the disease long before it had to be). British economic historian Niall Ferguson has now looked at how people dealt with other plagues that came upon them – shaking earth, wars, hunger – and wondered what conclusions people drew from these catastrophes and what conclusions people drew from the corona pandemic would be applicable (spoiler: it’s complicated).
Here one Review of “Doom”.