Why do teenagers find SchülerVZ, flickr or YouTube so fantastic? What are they finding in the communities on the internet that doesn't exist in real life, and what exactly are they doing with it? The JFF- Institut für Medienpädagogik (Institute for Media Education) looks into these questions and learns from a 15 year-old "I think the future will just be one big Second Life."...
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Memoirs and Biographies /
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Nonfiction
Memoirs 
The critics all agree that with "Geboren am 13. August" Jens Bisky has written a successful version of the GDR memoir. The Bisky family belonged to the socialist upper class in the GDR. Jens' father, Lothar Bisky, was rector of the East German film school in Babelsberg, near Berlin, and now heads the PDS, the successor party to the former East German communist party. Jens' brother Norbert Bisky is a famous painter. Jens Bisky, born in 1969, is now editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung's feuilleton section. For Toralf Staud, writing in Die Zeit,
he has written a "true book" about the GDR, calling it an antidote to the GDR nostalgia so treasured by those who have forgotten what
the communist regime was really like. For Staud the book attains great
clarity, as Bisky "dissects" the GDR without the anger of a dissident.
"Surprisingly pale" however, are the final chapters on the fall of the
Wall and the arrival in the German Federal Republic.
Ulrich Enzensberger's "Die Jahre Kommune I" takes a fresh look at familiar territory. The author was the youngest member of the famous Berlin commune which also included Rainer Langhans and Uschi Obermaier. In Die Zeit Wolfgang Kraushaar, an expert
on the generation of 68, commends Enzensberger's successful weaving
together of the personal with the historical and his fusing of many
individual episodes into a story.
Biographies
Schiller
is the talk of the land these days. This year is the 200th anniversary
of his death, and new honours are being heaped on the long derided
poet. Rüdiger Safranski's huge Schiller biography even ranks among Der Spiegel's
Top 20 bestsellers. "The book just about manages to exorcise Schiller
of the ghost of platitude," writes Rolf-Bernhard Essig in Die Zeit.
It portrays Schiller as a poet whose modernity lies in his conscious
opposition to nihilism. "Gripping objectivity," promises Hans-Jürgen
Schings in the FAZ. In the NZZ, Manfred Koch calls Safranski's Schiller the Sartre of the 18th Century. 
Historian Johannes Kunisch has written the first comprehensive biography of "Friedrich der Große"
in twenty years, to great critical acclaim. The critics agree that this
is the first thoroughly modern portrait of Frederick the Great, though
many ask with a hint of regret what the book has done with Frederick's
greatness. The FAZ writes that old Fritz looks comes over as "a throne sitter from the generation of 68". The SZ struggles with Kunisch's shrinking Friedrich to a normal-sized late absolutist ruler. In Die Zeit,
historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler was thrilled with the book, finding it
"illuminating, well informed, differentiated, and entirely free of
blind veneration."
Hanno Loewy's biography of "Bela Balazs" uncovers new sides to this Hungarian multitalent. For many years the author, critic, essayist, librettist and theoretician Bela Balazs was known above all as the author of a book on film theory, "The Visible Man." Not in vain, writes NZZ
critic Laszlo Földenyi, for Balazs' key work was done in this area.
This book informatively sets out the background of Balazs' development,
his youth in Hungary, his ambivalent friendship with Georg Lukacs, and the relation to his Berlin mentor Georg Simmel.
And it shows how Balazs rediscovered his favourite genre, the
fairytale, in film. Földenyi praises the book as "excellent",
prophesying that it will remain a standard work for a long time to
come. Die Zeit finds the book "more gripping than most novels", while the FAZ admires the quality of the research. signandsight.com recommends Balazs' "Jugenderinnerungen" as one of the best autobiographies of recent years.
China's most famous woman poet Li Qingzhao lived in the 12th century. Previously unknown in Germany outside academic circles, Li comes alive in Barbara Beuys' biography, "Der Preis der Leidenschaft". Although Beuys cannot read classical Chinese, Jürgen Osterhammel in Die Zeit
praises "the thoroughness of her approach, her diligence and
earnestness". Beuys has conjured up a "wonderful portrait of medieval
China". "lx", writing in the NZZ, agrees that Beuys arouses interest in China, past and present.
Fiction /
Arabic Literature /
Memoirs and Biographies /
Politics /
Nonfiction
RSS
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.
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.
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 
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 "Les Bienveillantes" which has just been translated into German.
The 400-page German translation of Jonathan Littell's corpse-littered SS novel,"Les Bienveillantes," 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. 
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.
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.
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. 
The novel is blooming in the Urals, where the children of the former technology elite are letting their imaginations run riot. By Sonja Margolina
Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk's book "Dojczland" is a sophisticated portrait of German-Polish relations with flights of sarcasm and a fine sense of grotesque. Doused heavily in bourbon, it's a controversial bestseller in Poland. By Thomas Urban
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
Come cruising in the park they say is dead. In his
biography of Stefan George, Thomas Karlauf reveals the charismatic German poet's authoritarian practices and the homoerotic core of his work. By Alexander Cammann
Rüdiger Safranski has pulled off the improbable: his book on Romanticism is a genuinely exciting account of German intellectual history. By Ulrich Greiner
Germany's book market is being flooded this autumn by biographies of dead male writers. Ina Hartwig examines the whys, wherefores and potential pitfalls of this latest literary craze.
The German Book Prize 2007, an annual award for the best German language novel, has been awarded to Julia Franck. Read an English excerpt of her book, "Lady Midday", and of the other five on the shortlist.