From Willie WinklerElias Canetti was outraged when the young Fritsch proudly presented his suspicion that Buchmendel could be the model for Peter Kien, the main character in Canetti's novel "The Blinding". The Buchmendel was an invention of Stefan Zweig, and Canetti hated Zweig simply because Zweig had enabled him to publish The Blinding. In any case, for Georg Fritsch, Buchmendel with his "incomparable, this diamond book brain" was the model, that's what he wanted to become when he and his...
Pandemic and war, climate crisis and inflation: Journalist Sara Weber explores the question of how important professional life must be."The 1920s have so far resembled an unsavory crisis sandwich," writes Sara Weber in the introduction to her new book with the beautiful title "The world is ending, and I still have to work?" Pandemic and war, climate crisis and inflation - while these crises would actually demand our attention, we just keep working. And in a working world that is...
This book is as monstrous as its subject, the life of the Jewish religious philosopher Jacob Taubes. In nearly 900 pages, Catholic University Washington historian emeritus Jerry Z. Muller unfolds this life before us as a collection of every imaginable sight, insight, oddity, abyss, and yes, gossip. Born in Vienna in 1923 and died in Berlin in 1987, Taubes reflects the breadth of intellectual life in the 20th century like hardly any other contemporary thinker, not only in Germany but...
New international thrillers depict melodramatic entanglements in Warsaw, Damascus - and in the ballet. source site
Violence against women has many faces. During National Socialism, it ranged from the SS-Lebensbornheimen to mass rapes at the end of the war. What survival strategies did the women find, what messages did they pass on to the next generations? A conversation with the writer Ulrike Draesner, who makes the unsaid audible in her novel "Die Verwandten".From Antje WeberEscape, violence, exile - these are the themes that have been on Ulrike Draesner's mind for a long time. The writer, who...
Harald Stutte tells of a failed attempt to escape from the GDR and Stasi custody - and of a pan-German boomer trauma. source site
At the beginning of the 1990s, a manuscript began to circulate in Germany with the unwieldy title "Literature Discussion and Fiction in the Jewish Journals in Germany 1837-1918". In it, the author Itta Shedletzky brought to light a world that had previously remained unrecognized behind the big names and their books. For the first time, she made visible the breadth and depth of the emancipation discourses that had been going on since 1837 with the founding of the General newspaper...
The books, films and radio plays of the "Drei ???" have been loved for decades, especially by adults. How can that be - and what makes them so special? About big stories and a special feeling. From Elisa BritzelmeierPress play once and everything is back. The parrot squawks, the phone rings, the Flex buzzes, and those voices too. Three friends who have been there for each other and for oneself for decades. Justus, Peter and Bob. source site
Sally Perel was an impressive storyteller. He was born in Peine in Lower Saxony in 1925, was expelled from school ten years later, the family business was destroyed, the family fled first to Lodz and then to the west of the country after the invasion of Poland. In 1941 he was captured there and presented himself to the Wehrmacht soldiers as an "ethnic German".He described the moment countless times, especially at the readings that he tirelessly gave at German schools...
The Russian best-selling author Vladimir Sorokin has repeatedly emphasized that political rule in Russia since the reign of Ivan the Terrible has essentially always been exercised in the same way: with brute force. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union did not change this principle. The "dead body of the Soviet", according to Sorokin, was not buried in the 1990s and has been rotting in a corner ever since. Now he has risen and threatens the whole world with annihilation....
