In the scholarly disciplines, the criticism of ideology is hardly spoken of any longer. The ideology-critical method of immanent critique, associated with the philosopher Karl Marx, is frowned upon. Wrongly. It is a philosophical method that goes back to Socrates and that has since been developed further....
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
By Ina Hartwig
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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.
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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.
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The novel is blooming in the Urals, where the children of the former technology elite are letting their imaginations run riot. By Sonja Margolina
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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Ann Cotten is the poster girl for Germany's poetry jet set. She publishes manifestos at 6 in the morning, pours through dictionaries of foreign words and takes very fruitful lunch breaks. By Ina Hartwig
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A new edition of the Dutch classic "Character" has just come out. For Dutch author Cees Nooteboom, the novel is a timeless masterpiece of cold fire. Ferdinand Bordewijk wrote it with an etching needle and today's readers are still at his mercy.
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