All the members of the European Union espouse the common value of fair and efficient cooperation, which in turn involves smooth communication on as equal a footing as possible in business, politics, the arts and the EU institutions. The large linguistic communities, whose languages are often learned as foreign languages, also have particular interests....
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Seas of stone
The publication of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has kicked off a heavy debate which - as EU's the recent climate protection plans show - is affecting political decision-making. The NZZ feuilleton asked writers from far and wide to report on climate change from a personal point of view. The series begins with Swiss author Leo Tuor, who has felt the effects of the Earth's warming right up to his belly button.
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Underwater
Continuing with the series, originally published in the NZZ, of first-hand accounts of climate change by international writers, Hans Maarten van den Brink talks of arks and dykes and watersport and the Dutch obsession with the sea.
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Black Christmas
In the NZZ's climate change series, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells how Christmas changed in 2006, with choking heat and clammy bedsheets.
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Rain
Continuing the NZZ's climate change series, Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera tells how everything is perfect for the model farmer with a mathematical mind. Until the rain messes up his calculations.
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From Bombay with smog
In a new sequel of the NZZ's climate change series, Kiran Nagarkar affords a lung-clogging view from Bombay, where this winter the smog was a block of dirty concrete that started a couple of metres from where you stood and stretched all the way to the sky.
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Meteorologists versus shamans
Continuing the NZZ's series of first-hand accounts of climate change by international writers, siberian-born Juri Rytcheu picks fun at polar meteorologists and admits he wouldn't mind it getting a bit warmer.
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Grapes from Greenland
Continuing the NZZ's series of first-hand accounts of climate change by international writers, Danish author Jorn Riel tells of his psychedelic visions for the future of the Arctic.
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Fools' gold and carbon credits
To round off the NZZ series of writers on climate change, Zakes Mda of South Africa takes on the trade in carbon credits. Instead of providing an incentive to control pollution, it gives the world's wealthy classes carte blanche to pollute with clear consciences.
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RSS
Günter Grass has just published his diary from 1990, recording the tumultous events after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "From Germany to Germany" is a list of ominous predictions for the future of German unity. The former GDR writer Monika Maron looks at how blinded Grass was by his own preconceptions.
This year Turkey was the guest country at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We introduce the books that attracted the most critical attention.
and all the best for 2009!
This 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
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.
The 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.
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 "The Kindly Ones".
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. 
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.