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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Thomas Pynchon's latest novel "Against the Day" got panned by critics in the USA. Denis Scheck sees this as evidence of rampant anti-intellectualism. He maintains that the book is a masterpiece: a swan song to anarchism, an incisive look at post 9/11 America, and a hilarious romp through literary genres.
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Germany as a culture does not correspond to the German nation. Which means that the much-quoted truth that the Germans were united by their literature or their language has always also been a lie. For German-Iranian writer Navid Kermani the most German of German writers is none other than Franz Kafka.
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Once relegated to the minor leagues of the "developing world", India is now rising to the status of a leading power - and not only technologically and economically. Its ongoing social revolution is reflected in the literary realm as well. Claudia Kramatschek introduces a new generation of writers, a far cry from the country's senior cultural ambassadors of yesteryear.
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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)
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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.
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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...
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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