The books of the month of May: – Culture

Wolfgang Knöbl: Sociology before history

It’s easy to make fun of sociological diagnoses of the times. However, it is much more difficult to determine where they actually get their power of persuasion from. The Hamburg sociologist Wolfgang Knöbl has attempted an answer that amounts to a critique of sociological reason. While the evolution of the current state is explained with huge process terms such as modernization, according to Knöbl, what is really “process-oriented about all these processes” is forgotten. Where do we get the terms we use to explain the present? And how do we know how this present could come about historically? Knöbl’s criticism of “sociology before history” should be understood as a warning.

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Nicole Krauss: Being a man

“Ein Mann sein” brings together ten stories that, despite their straightforwardness, are complex and intimate in a special way. The close bond between people is often the flywheel of the plot. And these bonds sometimes appear out of nowhere or result from almost absurd constellations. It’s often about nurturing and the abyss of neediness that arises when parents don’t give their children security, whether because of transgenerational trauma or because they have other plans. Like when Romi, the girlfriend from the Ershadi story, fucks her former boyfriend and her body finally comes back to life after months of caring for her dying father.

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Yade Yasemin Önder: We know we can, and we fall in sync

A heavyweight father, plus a daughter who is unsubtly advised by relatives to be more mindful of her food while she gorges herself, only to stick her finger down her throat in the toilet. This novel is an idiosyncratic fund of associative prose, somewhat grotesque, but above all consistently cheerful and at the same time a little morbid. Author Yade Yasemin Önder illuminates this ambiguity of female experiences of defenselessness and self-normation. Sometimes it hurts to read. “We know we could, and we fall synchronously” is formally challenging, pleasantly extravagant and full of serious signs such as bulimia, violence and the terrible process of growing into the eternally unattainable standard of beauty.

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Eckhart Nickel: Spitzweg

Although Kirsten, Carl and the narrator are about to graduate from high school, “Spitzweg” is not a coming-of-age novel in the sense of wild hearts and exciting nocturnal skinny dipping in the lake. And although the book appears to be set in an extended present, there is no concrete reference to it. “Spitzweg” is a fantasy in which no smartphones light up, no e-cars turn the corner. It’s about three students who hatch a plan together to get one over on the art teacher. How much art can be an instructive mirror in the search for the ego and what wonders it holds in store for each of us can be read about in “Spitzweg”.

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Wolfram Lotz: Holy Scripture I

A total diary in which nothing is missing, really nothing at all, that’s what Wolfgang Lotz’s “Holy Scripture I” represents. For a year, playwright Wolfram Lotz wanted to write about “everything” and see what would happen with the text and with it. He lets the text take control. What happens on the 912 pages is poetry, prose, the finest humor, the most beautiful nonsense. And this nonsense is like a stream of thoughts that you get sucked into. So you follow Lotz in everyday family life, on night walks, ICE rides or in the theater. Sometimes writing down the shopping list gets in the way. A novel in notes, mini-dramas, aphorisms, neologisms and poems. Each day is unfolded and documented.

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Shulamit Volkov: Germany from a Jewish Perspective

The Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov has presented a modern German history from the perspective of the Jews. The book shows years of research and reflection. Volkov shows how double-edged the Enlightenment’s efforts to “improve” the situation of the Jews were: Bourgeois emancipation was also supposed to result in the shedding of historically outdated characteristics that were perceived as unpleasant; not only was the situation of the Jews supposed to be “improved,” they themselves should be get better from it. Volkov’s book drives all solemnity out of national introspection without reversing its opposite, an indiscriminate apocalyptic indictment.

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Delphine de Vigan: The children are kings

Another entertaining novel by Delphine de Vigan, dealing with not so entertaining problems. The fact that social media causes harm to children and adolescents and puts them under pressure is well known, but is rightly addressed in her novel. “The children are kings” tells the crime story of an alleged kidnapping. In addition, the novel speaks passionately about the effects of social media, and finally it presents the psychological drama of an addict, her husband trapped in codependency and the children at their mercy.

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Franziska Davies, Katja Makhotina: Open Wounds in Eastern Europe

“The Ukraine is far too pale on our map of memory, far too hazy.” That’s what Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre near Kyiv last year. The historians Franziska Davies and Katja Makhotina have set out to change that. You have traveled to many scenes of Nazi mass crimes in Eastern Europe and seen how the Nazi occupiers’ war of annihilation in 1939-45 is commemorated in Russia, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic States. Not only in Germany are there gaps that need to be filled with historical knowledge. In view of Putin’s war of aggression, an important book about why the Germans in particular are obliged to help Ukraine.

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Rüdiger von Fritsch: turning point. Putin’s war and its aftermath

Rüdiger von Fritsch knows what he is writing about. The retired diplomat was German ambassador in Moscow from 2014 to 2019; He knows Vladimir Putin’s world of thoughts from a few personal encounters. Fritsch explains very clearly what mistakes were made in the West – from a lack of historical awareness to a lack of understanding of the sensitivities in Eastern Europe. And he analyzes precisely what makes the Russian president tick and what needs to be done in view of the invasion of Ukraine. A clever treatise by a connoisseur who clears up numerous – unfortunately still widespread – myths about Putin’s politics.

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