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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Culture steps over the border into power, power welcomes it with a open arms and culture repays the compliment with a pen. Or more specifically, the French star playwright Yasmina Reza ("Art") shadowed Nicolas Sarkozy throughout the election campaign and then published "L'Aube le soir ou la nuit", now available in German as "Frühmorgens, abends oder nachts", a portrait of a man who landed the job he had always coveted. The proximity to her subject, for the FAZ at least, has not impaired her vision, but has allowed the author to practise an unsparing "vivisection" of a man of our time.
Into the kitchen
Bill Buford was the literary editor at the New Yorker but left his job to study under the star chef Mario Batali. He then described the excruciating results in "Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany". Critics from the FAZ and FR cannot believe their eyes. The "jobs from hell" have been transformed into an exquisite reading pleasure and you learn everything you ever needed to know about the art of cooking at the very highest level, or a perhaps a wafer thin mint too much. (Here an excerpt from the New Yorker)
Islam
The non-fiction books this spring take on Islam from all imaginable angles. One of the most respected authorities on the subject, Olivier Roy, has written his "Le Croissant et le chaos", now available in German, as a polemic against over-simplification. He doesn't limit himself to the - nuanced - criticism of hawkish American policy, but also insists that the western image of Islam, veiled as it is by ignorance, should be more complex. The German feuilletons couldn't agree more. The FAZ believes that it is "already the most important book for the aftermath of the next major terrorist attack." The SZ is overflowing with praise for this "furious little book", the taz quibbles with a number of details but recommends it nevertheless, as the work of an "original thinker."
But there is no question where allegiances lie in the battle of the Mohammed biographies. While "Mohammed" by the Dutch academic Hans Jansen met with fierce resistance from die Zeit, mainly on the basis of its sarcasm and "unscientific argumentation", German Islam expert Tilman Nagel won all round approval for his two books. In "Mohammed" he examines the "life and legends" of the prophet; in "Allas Liebling" (Allah's favourite) he analyses the "origins and forms of belief in Mohammed". For SZ critic Peter Heine, a colleague of Nagel, the results of the research and their presentation are "impressive and convincing in their entirety". See our feature by Tilman Nagel here.
Two further books probe the relationship between Europe and Islam from historical and art historical vantage points. Ekkehard Eickhoff has drastically updated his classic book "Venedig, Wien und die Osmanen" (Venice, Vienna and the Ottomans), which describes Euro-Islamic relations in the second half of the 17th century, to the immense satisfaction of the FAZ. The paper celebrates the volume as a shining example of a "narrative historiography" which was bordering on extinction. iIn "Florenz und Bagdad" art historian Hans Belting discovers Arab roots to the concept of central perspective, a construct widely believed to be typically western. For the SZ, it is nothing less than a "stroke of genius" which should be read as an appeal for a deeper comparison of the two cultures more. Die Zeit found the book "saturated with thoughts and facts".
Cultural and Art History
Two non-fiction books embark on a romp through the world of lust. The SZ was tickled pink by the German translation of Thomas W. Laqueur's "Solitary Sex" an aptly titled cultural history of masturbation and found it downright "refreshing". In particular the author's adroit situation of sexual discourse within the context of economics and aesthetics made it a convincing read. And the same paper also recommends Wolfgang Schuller's "Die Welt der Hetären" (the world of the hetaera) for its nonchalant delivery of an abundance of information. The hetaera were unmarried, artistic beauties of Ancient Greece who earned their living entertaining men, but who often moved in high society and were held in the utmost esteem - the Byzantine Empress Theodora being the most famous example.
And for dessert: An anthology edited by Paul Freedman on the "Food", which promises to be no less than a "history of taste". It certainly satisfied the critic at the FAZ who was amazed that academics can write so readably. The book is also "sumptuously illustrated" - and "fabulous" all in all.
Society
1968 has been in and out over the last forty years like flares, books on etiquette and Soul. Götz Aly's provocative new book "Unser Kampf" (our struggle) has fired debate and heaped mostly negative judgments upon itself. Its central thesis - that the '68ers differed little from their Nazi parents in their dogmatism - is hinted at in the title. Die Zeit found it "shrilly construed" and the SZ dismissed most of it as "tosh"; the FR at least applauded the "crisp polemic". And in the end the usually '68-friendly taz leapt - albeit with reservations - to defend Aly against his critics, agreeing with him about the disinterest of the revolutionaries in either democratisation or the confrontation of the Nazi past. Here an excerpt in German
Now that "Germany needs a new elite" has become a popular cry, a number of writers have taken it upon themselves to look at what this entails. Julia Friedrichs (25) turned down a job at McKinsey to do a tour of elite universities, academies and boarding schools, the forcing houses of the "powerful people of tomorrow" and returned in a state of shock. In her reportage "Gestatten: Elite" (allow me to introduce myself: Elite) Friedrichs found out that it is not achievement that counts but, as the critic in the FAZ so neatly put it: "habitus and status".
Michael Hartmann drew similar conclusions but from a sociological perspective. His study "Eliten und Macht in Europa" (elites and power in Europe) shows that the top jobs in the business world simply beyond reach for people from the wrong background. The taz calls the book a godsend for sociology. Die Zeit also found it hard to put down but asks why the author omits all political dimensions from his diagnosis. Writing for Perlentaucher, Arno Widmann calls it "one of the most important books of recent years."
Music
The FAZ has discovered the "most dangerous and most delightful" non-fiction book of the year: musical agent Sonja Simmenauer manages string quartets for a living and in her book "Muss es sein?" (must it be?) she poses the ultimate "Gretchen question" of human existence. Yes, it's about the string quartet as an "exemplary life form" or more precisely, it shows that life is only worth living if we are passionate about something - like string quartet music. The review in die Zeit is distinctly less passionate in tone, however friendly.
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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