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
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
A game is a game is a game: Ludwig Harig is one of the greatest child-brains of German literature and a master of the football sonnet to boot. "Oh trickled ball! Oh toe-flicked leather!" A visit to juggler of words in Saarland's Sulzbach. By Oliver Ruf
read more
The Ingeborg Bachmann Competition has just ended in Klagenfurt. One of the participants was writer Clemens Meyer, whose debut novel "Als wir träumten" was highly acclaimed at the Leipzig Book Fair in March. He spoke with Gerrit Bartels just before the competition about Klagenfurt, his writing and tattoos.
read more
At the end of May, Austrian author Peter Handke was informed he had been selected as winner of this year's Heinrich Heine Prize awarded by the city of Dusseldorf. A controversy then flared up over Handke's support for Slobodan Milosevic, whereupon the prize was revoked. We've compiled the major voices from the ensuing debate in the German-language press.
read more
2006 is the 150th anniversary of the death of German poet Heinrich Heine and the debate surrounding this year's literary Heinrich-Heine Prize is currently filling out the feuilletons. Here we publish writer Georg Klein's compilation of his top ten favourite Heine quotes on that most controversial of subjects: religion.
read more
Update: Romanian-German poet Oskar Pastior was imprisoned in a Soviet Gulag from 1945 to 1949. The new novel of this year's Nobel laureate Herta Müller is based on interviews with Pastior and other Gulag survivors.
The prestigious Georg Büchner Prize for literature is to be awarded to poet Oskar Pastior. Martin Lüdke welcomes the long overdue decision to honour the work of a mild mannered word wizard.
read more
The German feuilletons have discovered the other - and with force. The most talked-about literary works deal with 19th century travellers, Turkish girls in Anatolia, youth gangs in Leipzig or coma-stricken narrators. In our nonfiction section, Necla Kelek's study of Turkish men in Germany launched a thousand arguments.
read more
After her book about imported brides, Necla Kelek turns her attention to Turkish men. Frank Schirrmacher warns of the ills of childless society, and Lars Brand remembers his father, Chancellor Willy. Plus enticing monographs on Berlusconi, Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, Jean Sibelius, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Bernini.
read more
Like hero, like author. Ilija Trojanow, world traveller, author of travel books and Mecca pilgrim, has written an astounding biographical novel about Richard Francis Burton, Mecca pilgrim, author of travel books and world traveller. By Karl-Markus Gauß
read more
Ukranian author Yuri Andrukhovych was recipient of this year's Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. Andrukhovych's acceptance speech, in which he expresses deep gratitude for the distinction and deeper sorrow that European understanding remains an unattained goal, caused a minor furore.
read more
Russian poet Olga Martynova returns to Moscow after 15 years away and discovers that the city has lost its grey communist pallor. In fact, it's a pleasant, busy, contented metropolis,
whose buildings and memorials, while kitschy at times, actually have a certain charm.
read more
How the Western Ukrainian provincial nest of Ivano-Frankivsk turned into a thriving literary metropolis and multicultural frontier between East and West. By Holger Gemba
read more
Germany is the guest of honour at this year's Cairo International Book Fair. With a diversity of cultural themes, the German organisers have honoured the Egyptian side as only a glamorous tango-dancer can do, writes Egyptian author Ahmed Alaidy. But why did they give the cold shoulder to publisher and opposition member Muhammad Hashim?
read more