She produced her first film on tick in 1973 and straightaway it won her a German Film Prize. Now, in 2008, Regina Ziegler is considered Germany?s most successful film and television producer, and this year marks her production company?s 35th anniversary....
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Bettina Wassmann is a bookseller and publisher in Bremen. After
finishing school in 1958, she trained as a bookseller in Rodewald, near
Bremen. From 1961 to 1969 she worked at "Wolffs Bücherei" in Berlin,
returning to Bremen in May 1969. In July of that year she opened her
own bookshop in Bremen on the street, Am Wall 164. There she started
publishing an edition of bibliophile titles, among them "Der perfekte
Mord" (The perfect murder) by Djuna Barnes; "Abschied von gestern.
Kritische Theorie heute" (Yesterday's farewell. Critical theories
today) by Detlev Claussen; "Das Abendmahl, das Geld und die neuen
Medien" (The last supper. Money and new media) by Jochen Hörisch;
"Bartleby, der Schreiber. Eine Geschichte aus der Wall-Street"
(Bartleby, the writer. A story from Wall Street) by Hermann Melville;
"H. c. Alfred Sohn-Rethel" by Oskar Negt; and "Das Ideal des Kaputten"
(The ideal of the broken) by Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Bettina Wassmann was born in
1942 in Plauen in the Vogtland (where the family had moved to avoid
the bombing of Bremen). Her father was a cotton merchant
(Baumwoll-Börse Bremen), her mother an artist. Bettina Wassmann was
married to Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who died in 1990.
For those unfamiliar with Alfred Sohn-Rethel,
I'll try to paint a brief portrait here. He was born in 1899. He was
learned, without being lost in an ivory tower. He was an
epistemological thinker with an excellent knowledge of Marx. Of all the
Marxists, he was certainly the most original. From the 1920s on he
worked on his materialist critique of epistemology. When this was
published in the 1970s it won him widespread acclaim. Neither Max Horkheimer's withering criticism nor Theodor Adorno's
praise could divert his attention. Alone and resolute, he continued to
work on his heretical theory of money until he reached a ripe old age.
With the patience of an angel he went about showing that the form of
thinking develops out of the form of goods, and that the transcendental
subject owes much to the idiosyncracies of products, exchange and
money: that the origin of pure thought lies in the form of goods, and
not the other way around. His work aimed at unveiling the secret of
transcendental philosophy, in revealing the transcendental subject in
the form of goods. His life's work was comprised of meticulously
lifting this veil.
*
The biographies originally appeared in German in Die Tageszeitung on October 31, 2005.
Translation: jab.
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.