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 and Poetry / World War II / Politics / Nonfiction
Work can no longer form the foundation of our self-image. With this simple statement, Wolfgang Engler seems to have struck a nerve among Feuilletonists. Engler, born 1952 in Dresden, teaches Cultural Sociology and Aesthetics at one of the the famous Ernst Busch acting school in Berlin. Although many reviewers find Engler's proposal of "citizen's assistance"– a base welfare for all – to be impracticable either for anthropological or financial reasons, there is general consensus that Engler's radical "Bürger, ohne Arbeit" (citizens, without work) provides food for thought in Germany, a country with over 5 million unemployed (12.6 percent of the population). Die Zeit agrees that "it's time for us all to think about how we want to live and work in the world of tomorrow". For the SZ, the "citizen's assistance" suggestion does not go far enough; the FR likewise finds the anarchic measures inappropriate if all they amount to is a call for a European social compact.
"Rudi Dutschke, Andreas Baader und die RAF". This volume of essays by Wolfgang Kraushaar, Karin Wieland and Jan Philipp Reemtsma has provoked a major debate in Germany. The overarching thesis is that from its very inception, the 1968 student movement leaned towards violence.
While the German left has always preferred to see a qualitative
difference between the student idealists and the RAF terrorists,
Kraushaar places them on a continuum. Particularly controversial is
Kraushaar's depiction of Rudi Dutschke, the charismatic student leader
who died as a result of injuries from a bullet wound – he was shot
during a student demonstration – and thus earned martyr's status in
some quarters. Kraushaar alleges that Dutschke wittingly promoted the use of violence.
Reemtsma and Kraushaar, scholars of literature and political science
respectively, are both members of the 1968 generation and both
currently seated at the Institute for Social Research in Hamburg. In
1996, Reemtsma, heir to his family's tobacco empire, was abducted and held captive
for a month before being released in return for payment of 30 million
Deutschmarks (more). In his writing, he discusses justice, criminality and
historical conscience. 
"We have to hope that Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit are wrong", writes Die Zeit about "Okzidentalismus" (which has appeared in English as "Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism"). Buruma and Margalit have presented various author's positions on "occidentalism" – a widespread hatred of the West and response to Edward Said's notion of "orientalism". Die Zeit hopes that the compilation does not reflect reality, but adds, "we cannot be certain". The FR likes the sophisticated thesis that the ideological anti-Western position in the Islamic world actually takes its inspiration from within Europe. The FAZ is not convinced by the inventory of unconnected prejudices and demands a more rigorous analysis. Dutch-born
Ian Buruma lives in London, teaches at Bard College and is an expert on
Asian literature and history. Avishai Margalit, born in Palestine and
now Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is considered one
of the most original thinkers in the areas of social philosophy and
ethics in Israel and beyond.
Necla Kelek does not mince words in her condemnation of arranged marriage practices among Turkish families in Germany. The taz believes "Die Fremde Braut" (The Foreign Bride) should be compulsory reading in German schools. The SZ and FAZ are more reserved, the latter accusing the author of over-generalisation. Necla
Kelek, born 1957 in Istanbul, studied economics and sociology in
Germany and wrote her doctorate on "Islam in the Everyday". Today she
is consultant to the justice authorities in Hamburg on the treatment of
Turkish-Muslim prisoners; she also supports the current legal
initiative in Baden-Württemberg to criminalise forced marriage. In the collection "Islam in Sicht", (Islam in sight) compiled by Ludwig Ammann and Nilüfer Göl, however, the public face of Islam is presented in a nuanced and sophisticated way, writes to the NZZ. The FR learnt from the "highly stimulating reflections" that Islamic practice is not invariably oriented to the past but rather is always partly a reaction to developments in the West.
Fiction and Poetry / World War II / 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