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.
more
Fiction /
Arabic Literature /
Memoirs and Biographies /
Politics /
Nonfiction
History
Why reviews of this book came so late in the major national papers is a mystery. Anita Kugler's "Scherwitz, der jüdische SS-Offizier", the story of the - possibly - Jewish SS officer, Eleke Scherwitz, is the most exciting
non-fiction book of the season. (Read an excerpt in German.) Kugler, a first-rate journalist, tells
the story of a young man who saved - but perhaps also murdered - Jews
in the Latvian concentration camp at Lenta. The German courts sentenced him with exceptional harshness after the war, justifying their decision with the comment that his being Jewish made his crimes particularly abhorrent! Kugler's book follows the trail of this survivor. If it hadn't been a question of life and death, Scherwitz - after 700 pages we still do not know if this was his real name - could easily be portrayed as an impostor. This unbelievable story is also a book about writing history. Kugler set out to find Scherwitz' contemporaries and went door to door through villages asking about him. And she spent seven years in the archives. Her conclusion: even eye witnesses lie. FAZ critic Hans-Jürgen Döscher complains Kugler can establish conclusively neither the origins nor the motives of her "hero". In the SZ, historian Susanne Heim finds Scherwitz' story "as exciting as a detective novel", while still deserving to be called good historical writing.
Valentin Groebner writes a new type of history in "Der Schein der Person",
a social history of medieval practices of personal identification and ID control. Writing in the FAZ, historian Michael Borgolte praises the 'new scientific style' of the author, which is both narrative and highly readable. Groebner's study shows above all that there was a large gap between the attempt to establish even an approximate record of the person, and the true state of affairs in the Middle Ages. The book argues that as in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, successful surveillance reflects more the wishes of those in power than a real state of affairs. Borgolte is absolutely thrilled with Groebner's approaches to his theme, calling study "brilliant", and praising the "new scientific style", "narrative joy" and pointed reference to today's readers. The SZ does not deny the book's entertainment value, but finds it lacking in methodological integrity.
Science 
The rediscovery of the work of natural scientist, explorer and multi-talent Alexander von Humboldt
(1769-1859) by Die Andere Bibliothek publishing house made the cover of Germany's
top news magazine Der Spiegel. Published anew are the two-volume "Kosmos" as well as "Ansichten der Kordilleren und Monumente der eingeborenen Völker Amerikas" and "Ansichten der Natur". Critics commend Hans Magnus Enzensberger for renewing German interest in this seminal author. The NZZ called the work the "opus magnus
of a universal thinker", while the SZ praised Humboldt's approach of
"understanding the world through its designs". According to the FR, Humboldt's writing is as least as thrilling as the adventure novels of Alexander Dumas and Robert Louis
Stevenson. The FAZ further also recommended the audio book of "Kosmos".
There was general praise for Matthias Hagner's historical study on brain research, "Geniale Gehirne". The fact that genius is located in the brain does not go very far in explaining it, comments Eberhard Ortland in Die Zeit. For one thing, it is not exactly easy to take a look into the – living – brain. And finding an answer to how genius gets in or originates there is not easy at all. Michael Hagner's study looks at scientists' attempts to explain it. Geniuses' brains have been "collected, palpated and measured" and cut in slices for centuries, on the search for the "nature of spirit". Hagner's thesis and major discovery is that this nature is a scientific assumption, and has always been the child of a specific cultural spirit, which Hagner investigates in his study. Often, these cultural spirits answer to less attractive names, like "racism, sexism, and eugenics". Ortland appreciates Hagner's "richly documented and illuminating study", which avoids any "denunciation of the neurosciences", but has a "sharp eye for historical constellations." The FAZ feuilleton, which has a programmatic interest in everything scientific, has certified the book as the long awaited "major contemporary novel" which has appeared in the form of nonfiction.
Philosophy
US philosopher Philippa Foot remains to be discovered in Germany. Fittingly, her book "Die Natur des Guten" (Natural Goodness) has now been translated into German. Foot argues that moral judgements are not subjective, and that there are objective moral rules. For NZZ reviewer Ludger Heidbrink the thin volume on the basic principles of moral philosophy gives "great reading pleasure", although he disagrees with the author's conclusions: At the end of her book, Foot must accept the compromise of a rationalistic virtue morality, which assumes a "natural goodness" of man to justify the morality of his actions. The FAZ, FR and SZ also give the book extensive reviews.
Critics agree that Harald Weinreich's "Knappe Zeit",
a history of time shortage, is anything but a waste of time. The book
collects insights of philosophers and writers from ancient times to the
present into the shared human perception that time is in short supply.
The SZ and the FAZ admire the ease with which Weinrich travels
through western intellectual history. In the FAZ, medieval historian Kurt Flasch admires the author's erudition and scholarship, as well as his original contributions to the Western conception of time. For Flasch, Weinreich's originality lies in his "approach blending philology with medical history". Weinreich draws attention to the etymology of the Latin word "tempus", which means both "time" and "temples" – the flat regions on either side of the forehead.The Latin word already reflected the relationship between time and the human body.
Equally well received is Elmar Holenstein's "Philosophie-Atlas",
which traces the "places and pathways of thinking" worldwide. The
book's maps and pictures have evoked the penny drop effect from all
critics. One should not expect a history of philosophy but rather, as
one NZZ reviewer put it, "a geographic accompaniment to readings in
philosophy".
Fiction /
Arabic Literature /
Memoirs and Biographies /
Politics /
Nonfiction
RSS
Twitter
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