The Books of the Month June: Who Makes the Politics of the Future? – Culture

Helene Hegemann: Schlachtensee

The chapters in Helene Hegemann’s collection of stories are episodes: 15 radical texts that paint a disturbingly oppressive and authentic picture of society. The author’s close gaze is calm, her characters powerful and comical. And the stories, as different as they may be, are not milieu studies, but odes to the mixed feeling, the average. The characters in “Schlachtensee” are called Minute, Jacoby or Safran, live in Canada, Northern France or Russia, love polyamorous, spend money, drink, date, feel sorry for each other and struggle with their banality. Overall: a painful pleasure.

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Andrea Tompa: Omerta

Andrea Tompa’s novel about the time of the Ceausescu dictatorship can hardly be understood from its plot and that is perhaps what makes it stand out. His great art is that his characters reveal much more about themselves and their world than they want or know. Kali, for example, not only speaks of the unhappiness of her marriage, in the rose breeder Vilmos Désci we recognize the silent opportunist of a party dictatorship. As the reading progresses, it becomes clear that this polyphonic novel consists not only of four voices, but above all of the silence of a fifth voice, the narrator’s voice of a contemporary historical novel. German readers owe a great European novel to Térezia Mora’s translation.

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Donatella Di Cesare: Philosophy of Migration

Di Cesare is one of the most prominent voices among pacifists and opponents of guns. Your call to demystify concepts such as state or nation is plausible. In the light of current events, however, it is once again unclear how their ideas could be implemented. However, their thinking should by no means be classified as naïve. Contrary to the rigid perspectives of states and nations, which have to define their inside and outside, in her “Philosophy of Migration” Di Cesare calls for a modern, new human right that corresponds to the reality of fragile and mobile living conditions of the 21st century.

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Alexander Görlach: Red alert

Alexander Görlach questions the passive role played by the West, at least as far as the threat from China is concerned. Beijing’s aggressive foreign policy, especially in countries like Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea, is becoming increasingly threatening. In Taiwan, fighter jets are flying over the country, experts expect that the Taiwan question will lead to a war within six years. Territorial conflicts there, as well as in Vietnam and Japan, create a tense situation, and Görlach asks whether China’s dictatorship overestimates itself and to what extent the West should act more actively.

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Thomas Großbölting: The guilty shepherds. History of Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church

Church historian Thomas Großbölting presented an abuse report on the Münster diocese in June, the first not to have been written by lawyers. Großbölting is less concerned with the individual guilt of the perpetrators than with the church system and how it encourages abuse. Appropriately, he has published a profound analysis that makes you shudder. Pastoral power and clericalism led to a “perpetrator ideology,” according to the equation. Or to put it another way: Abuse is “deeply anchored in Catholicism and its current social structure – theologically, morally and practically-pastorally”. With this the historian shakes the foundations of the Church.

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Anna Sauerbrey: Change of power. How a new generation of politicians is changing the country

The journalist Anna Sauerbrey took the 2021 federal election as an opportunity to look at the new political celebrity staff. A kind of rejuvenation has taken place. And so she tries time-Editor to find out how Generation X politicians – Baerbock, Lindner, Klingbeil – understand their work and their office and what distinguishes them from previous types of politicians. According to Sauerbrey, Generation X has a more sober approach than previous politicians. “Change of power” is more than a series of analyses. On 300 pages, the author also deals with the concept of generations and its limits.

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