Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen.
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Memoirs 
The critics all agree that with "Geboren am 13. August" Jens Bisky has written a successful version of the GDR memoir. The Bisky family belonged to the socialist upper class in the GDR. Jens' father, Lothar Bisky, was rector of the East German film school in Babelsberg, near Berlin, and now heads the PDS, the successor party to the former East German communist party. Jens' brother Norbert Bisky is a famous painter. Jens Bisky, born in 1969, is now editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung's feuilleton section. For Toralf Staud, writing in Die Zeit,
he has written a "true book" about the GDR, calling it an antidote to the GDR nostalgia so treasured by those who have forgotten what
the communist regime was really like. For Staud the book attains great
clarity, as Bisky "dissects" the GDR without the anger of a dissident.
"Surprisingly pale" however, are the final chapters on the fall of the
Wall and the arrival in the German Federal Republic.
Ulrich Enzensberger's "Die Jahre Kommune I" takes a fresh look at familiar territory. The author was the youngest member of the famous Berlin commune which also included Rainer Langhans and Uschi Obermaier. In Die Zeit Wolfgang Kraushaar, an expert
on the generation of 68, commends Enzensberger's successful weaving
together of the personal with the historical and his fusing of many
individual episodes into a story.
Biographies
Schiller
is the talk of the land these days. This year is the 200th anniversary
of his death, and new honours are being heaped on the long derided
poet. Rüdiger Safranski's huge Schiller biography even ranks among Der Spiegel's
Top 20 bestsellers. "The book just about manages to exorcise Schiller
of the ghost of platitude," writes Rolf-Bernhard Essig in Die Zeit.
It portrays Schiller as a poet whose modernity lies in his conscious
opposition to nihilism. "Gripping objectivity," promises Hans-Jürgen
Schings in the FAZ. In the NZZ, Manfred Koch calls Safranski's Schiller the Sartre of the 18th Century. 
Historian Johannes Kunisch has written the first comprehensive biography of "Friedrich der Große"
in twenty years, to great critical acclaim. The critics agree that this
is the first thoroughly modern portrait of Frederick the Great, though
many ask with a hint of regret what the book has done with Frederick's
greatness. The FAZ writes that old Fritz looks comes over as "a throne sitter from the generation of 68". The SZ struggles with Kunisch's shrinking Friedrich to a normal-sized late absolutist ruler. In Die Zeit,
historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler was thrilled with the book, finding it
"illuminating, well informed, differentiated, and entirely free of
blind veneration."
Hanno Loewy's biography of "Bela Balazs" uncovers new sides to this Hungarian multitalent. For many years the author, critic, essayist, librettist and theoretician Bela Balazs was known above all as the author of a book on film theory, "The Visible Man." Not in vain, writes NZZ
critic Laszlo Földenyi, for Balazs' key work was done in this area.
This book informatively sets out the background of Balazs' development,
his youth in Hungary, his ambivalent friendship with Georg Lukacs, and the relation to his Berlin mentor Georg Simmel.
And it shows how Balazs rediscovered his favourite genre, the
fairytale, in film. Földenyi praises the book as "excellent",
prophesying that it will remain a standard work for a long time to
come. Die Zeit finds the book "more gripping than most novels", while the FAZ admires the quality of the research. signandsight.com recommends Balazs' "Jugenderinnerungen" as one of the best autobiographies of recent years.
China's most famous woman poet Li Qingzhao lived in the 12th century. Previously unknown in Germany outside academic circles, Li comes alive in Barbara Beuys' biography, "Der Preis der Leidenschaft". Although Beuys cannot read classical Chinese, Jürgen Osterhammel in Die Zeit
praises "the thoroughness of her approach, her diligence and
earnestness". Beuys has conjured up a "wonderful portrait of medieval
China". "lx", writing in the NZZ, agrees that Beuys arouses interest in China, past and present.
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A precision engineer of the emotions, Peter Nadas traces the European upheavals of the past century in his colossal and epic novel "Parallel Stories", which was published in English in December. The core and epicentre of the novel is the body, which bears the marks of history and trauma. In his seemingly chaotic intertwining of lives and stories, Nadas penetrates the depths of the human animal with unique insight. A review by Joachim Sartorius 
The USA and the USSR should not simply be thought of as arch enemies of the Cold War. Beyond ideology, the two nations were deeply interested in one another. Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov were thrilled by the American Way of Life in 1935/6, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa praised the sheer vitality of the Russian people in 1947. Historian Karl Schlögel reviews a perfect pair of travel journals. Photo by Ilf and Petrov.
Turkish-born author, actor and director Emine Sevgi Özdamar was recently awarded the Alice Salomon Prize for Poetics. Coming to West Berlin in 1965, Özdamar first learned German at the age of 19. After stage school she went on to become the directorial assistant to Benno Besson and Matthias Langhoff at the Volksbühne in East Berlin while still living in West Berlin. Harald Jähner warmly lauds the author's uniquely visual sense of her acquired language and her ability to overcome the seemingly insurmountable dividing line through the city.
Nadezhda Mandelstam's personal memories of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, her intimate friend, offer a unique and moving testimony to friendship and resistance over decades of persecution. Published only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the text is still unavailable in English but has recently been translated into German. A unique historical document, celebrating an intellectual icon in an age of horror. Portrait of Akhmatova
This year is the 200th anniversary of the death of German writer Heinrich von Kleist. The author Gertrud Leutenegger has a very Kleistian afternoon on Elba, when she encounters the Marquise von O in the waiting room of a very strange eye doctor. 
Eugen Ruge has won the German Book Prize with his novel "In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts" (In times of fading light), an autobiographical story of an East German family. The award is presented to the best German-language novel just before the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Here we present this year's six shortlisted authors and exclusive English translations of excerpts from their novels.
Chinese dissident Liao Yiwu escaped into exile in Germany in July this year. His new book about his life in Chongqing prison has just been published in German as "Für Ein Lied und Hundert Lieder". Both book and author have a life-threatening odyssey behind them. I am overjoyed that Liao Yiwu is here with us and not at home in prison. By Herta Müller
No other European city suffered more in World War II than Leningrad under siege, when over a million people lost their lives. Russian literature delivers a rich testimony of the events which have been all but forgotten by the West. Only a few works, though, also do the disaster aesthetic justice. By Oleg Yuriev 
In this apology for the vice of reading, Bora Cosic describes the magnificent and fantastic discoveries of one of its practitioners – revealing how texts contain what we bring to them, how we sometimes read without reading and how books are not only found in books but many other places.Â
This year's German International Literature Award goes to "Venushaar", a Russian novel that starts out as a dialogue between an asylum seeker and an immigration officer, and opens into a vast choir of voices. A conversation with its author Mikhail Shishkin, a literary giant in his own country, and his German translator Andreas Tretner. By Ekkehard Knörer. (Image: Mikhail Shishkin © Yvonne Böhler)
Algeria's youth: Frustrated, isolated and in the stranglehold of clandestine political structures. Young Algerians are rebelling against being locked in traditional political and social structures, but have no chance of a national uprising like that in Tunisia, says Algerian author Boualem Sansal. An interview with Reiner Wandler. 
On what would have been Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran's 100th birthday, Suhrkamp has published a volume of his essays from the 1930s, "Über Deutschland". Effervescing with enthusiasm for Hitler and fascist ideas, they cast a dark shadow over his later writing. Fritz Raddatz wishes he'd never had to read such abominations and bids a former companion a bitter farewell. Photo: E.M. Cioran © Surhrkamp Verlag
Andre Müller Germany's most insightful and most feared interviewer is dead. Elfriede Jelinek said of him in her obituary: "Andre Müller goes all the way into people and then he makes them into language, and only then do they become themselves." Read his interviews with Ingmar Bergman and Hitler's sculptor Arno Breker in English. Photo courtesy 
Serbia was the country in focus at this year's Leipzig Book Fair – its extensive literature seems to be bound up in the straitjacket of politics. Serbia is having a hard time with Europe, and Europe is having a hard time with Serbia. Although there are signs of a softening stance, the country is still locked up in the self-imposed nationalist isolation into which it manoeuvred itself as the aggressor in the Yugoslavian war of secession. A visit there inspires mixed feelings. By Jörg Plath