Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

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 more

GoetheInstitute

Frohe Weihnachten, schöne Feiertage...

Monday 22 December, 2008

and all the best for 2009!

Signandsight will be back again on January 9th.
(Photo squirmelia)

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"I am the eternal altar boy"

Monday 17 November, 2008

TeaserPicThis year's prestigious Büchner Prize went to Austrian writer Josef Winkler. He talks to Paul Jandl about dung heaps, patriarchs, the fear of speechlessness and the elegance of John Paul II's coffin. Photo © Jerry Bauer / SV
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Turkey's poisoned pens

Thursday 9 October, 2008

Does participation at the Frankfurt Book Fair mean making propaganda for the AKP? In Turkey, this year's guest country at the Book Fair, writers have been feuding over this issue for months. Some of them have even called for a boycott. This time, however, it's more than just a Kemalist-Islamist divide. By Constanze Letsch
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German Book Prize 2008 - the shortlist

Monday 29 September, 2008

The six finalists for the German Book Prize 2008, an annual award for the best German language novel, have now been announced. Signandsight.com presents English excerpts of the shortlisted titles for the first time.
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Magic and guilt

Thursday 4 September, 2008

TeaserPicTeaserPicThe legendary German poets, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, met and fell in love in Vienna 1948. Their electric and torturous correspondence, which continued until 1961, has now been collected in book form for the first time. Ina Hartwig on what was probably the most complicated love story in post-war Germany.
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Books this Season: Fiction

Wednesday 14 May, 2008

The headlines were stolen by Charlotte Roche's moist little sex shocker and Jonathan Littell's sprawling SS fantasies but only two books united the critics: one is good and the other, utterly objectionable. There was a flurry of interest in some fabulous comics and a resurgence of the political and the historical novel. A dip into the books published in Germany this spring.
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Books this Season: Nonfiction

Monday 14 May, 2008

The nonfiction books this spring look into life as a budding president, a kitchen slave, a prophet, a string quartet. They pick apart the world of the elites, of lust and taste and '68.

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From abattoir to disco

Monday 28 April, 2008

Travels through the dreams and nightmares of Europe, in a small land of great poets, torn between Balkan catastrophe and Brussels. A reportage on Croatia, this year's partner country at the Leipzig Book Fair. By Gregor Dotzauer

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Evil dead

Wednesday 13 March, 2008

An SS man reflects on mass murder - and there's a pigeon hole for every vile deed. Novelist Georg Klein on the Holocaust and the enlightened harmony of trivial realism in Jonathan Littell's novel "The Kindly Ones".

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Rationalising the irrational

Wednesday 13 March, 2008

The 400-page German translation of Jonathan Littell's corpse-littered SS novel, "The Kindly Ones," has put the German-language feuilletons into a critical frenzy, despite the general consensus that the book is bad. We have compiled a selection of the accusations hurled.
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Double life is the drug

Wednesday 16 January, 2008

Kurt von Hammerstein was head of the Reichswehr, a grand seigneur, and an implacable opponent of National Socialism. In his new book "Hammerstein oder Der Eigensinn" (Hammerstein or idiosycrasy), Hans Magnus Enzensberger engages in dialogues with the dead to deliver a literary and lunatic precipitate of German history.
By Ina Hartwig
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Books this Season: Fiction

Wednesday 12 December, 2007

This literary autumn belongs to two Russian writers: Vassily Grossmann and Varlam Shalamov, whose epic works have been published in German at long last. But older Germans and German Romantics, Polish queens, Romanian Mannerists, combative atheists, Neopolitan Camorristi, Catalonian knights and a glutton of glorious abandon have also come up trumps.
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Books this Season: Nonfiction

Wednesday 12 December, 2007

The literary event of the season is the inexplicably delayed publication of two Russian masterpieces: Vassily Grossmann's historic drama of the 20th century "Life and Fate" and Varlam Shalamov's collection of tales from Kolyma "Durch den Schnee". On the German side, we have seen older novelists flexing their muscles and reaching for the skies, biographers looking up to bygone giants, and the feuilletons rallying to defend religion against the air strikes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.
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Treasure in the mountains

Monday 3 December, 2007

The novel is blooming in the Urals, where the children of the former technology elite are letting their imaginations run riot. By Sonja Margolina

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Bucharest in a trance

Monday 12 November, 2007

Romanian literature is still a tiny niche in the German book market. Mircea Cartarescu's latest novel to be published here, "Die Wissenden," shows readers what they are missing. A visit to Bucharest to meet the man who is probably Romania's most famous author. By Jörg Plath
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