When authors are permitted to ask themselves a question and then also provide the answer, this is often more revealing than a long autobiography. Tobias Wenzel and Carolin Seeliger invited 77 writers to talk to themselves and recorded these soliloquies....
more
In a major interview given a few years before his death, the irascible Austrian author Thomas Bernhard talks about the musicality of language, the eroticism of old men, the corruption of German writers, the twistedness of mankind, the similarities between Christianity and Nazism, the incurability of stupidity and what it means to be branded "Thomas Bernhard" for life. By Werner Wögerbauer (Photo © Andrej Reiser / Suhrkamp Verlag)
read more
György Dalos and Paul Lendvai explore the Hungarian Uprising. Saul Friedländer gives the first truly all-encompassing portrayal of the Holocaust. There's a run of striking memoirs by Imre Kertesz, Günter Grass and Joachim Fest. And Gary Schwartz' "Rembrandt Book" is the talk of the Rembrandt year.
read more
Indian literature burst onto the German market, rambunctious and effervescing. A choir of Eastern European voices sings of the Hungarian Uprising, the lost province of Sarmatia and Machiavellian nasties in provincial Poland. German literature scales mountains in free verse and buries itself in the aging process. And many a great man remembers...
read more
Islamicist movements are becoming increasingly influential in the Arab world. Yet with few exceptions, phenomena like fundamentalism and religiously motivated terror have hardly been dealt with in Arabic literature. By Mona Naggar
read more
Ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has just written his memoirs "Decisions", in which he relates at length what a smashing job he made of everything. And along the way he reveals a singular lack of literary talent. Writer Georg M. Oswald journeys into a rosy past.
read more
Historian Joachim Fest's memoirs of his youth, "Ich Nicht," document an elitism that seeks to distance itself from petty-bourgeois National Socialism, and form a counterpoint to the prevailing culture of memory in the Federal Republic of Germany. Although the historical establishment tended to view Fest askance, his recollections document a genuinely cultivated German bourgeoisie. By Jens Bisky
read more
Policemen as chief Mafiosi, gangster bosses as Hollywood icons, politics run by religion and businesses run by fear: Bombay the mega-city of schizophrenias. An exercise in the art of the poisonous declaration of love by Ilija Trojanow.
read more
On Saturday, the Lettre Ulysses Award, the only international prize for literary reporting, will be awarded in Berlin. We are offering a sneak preview of one of the texts: Li Datong's report of the legendary career of a Chinese village tyrant. It was one of the several critical texts for which the Beijing-based journalist lost his job.
read more
American first-time novelist Jonathan Littell has created the sensation of the French literary season with "Les Bienviellantes." Michael Mönninger describes the memoirs of a fictional SS officer as scandalous kitch, an epic panorama and eminently worth reading.
read more
In an interview with Eszter Radai, the Hungarian author Imre Kertesz talks about his new novel "Dossier K.", the breed of Euro-anti-Semitism after Auschwitz and how to survive a dictatorship.
read more
The Grass confession has spawned no end of consternation, reprobation and contemplation among Germany's intellectual elders. The writers Eva Menasse (born 1970) and Michael Kumpfmüller (born 1961) wonder when their generation will have a chance to set the tone of German debate - on issues that really matter, and without the deadening bass tone of German history in the background.
read more
Having claimed for sixty years that he was no more than a conscripted flak helper in World War Two, Günter Grass now admits that he actually served with the Waffen SS. He also explains that his first exposure to "real racism" came after the war, in an American prisoner of war camp, where the black soldiers were treated as second class citizens. Roman Bucheli finds the Nobel Prize laureate's recent revelations a little hard to swallow.
read more
Reactions by authors and critics to Nobel Prize winning author Günter Grass' confession that at 17 he served in the Waffen SS, the most brutal Nazi combat unit. An international press review. Updated Thursday September 14, 2006
read more
With this story, journalist Kathrin Passig won one of the most prestigious literary awards in German letters, the Ingeborg Bachman Prize. (Photo © Johannes Jander)
read more
The well-loved German poet and artist Robert Gernhardt died on June 30, 2006. We publish a selection of his poems in English with the kind permission of his translator Ursula Runde, and several drawings from Gernhardt's "German Readers" series.
read more
RSS
