Cornelia Funke tells stories of fairies and mud monsters, of adventurous girls, a gang of children in Venice ? and her stories somewhere between fantasy and adventure are Germany?s most successful literary export at the moment....
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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
Thuringia and Saxony Anhalt are two of Germany's most neglected states today, yet they make up the country's cultural heart. Gustav Seibt drives two hundred kilometres south of Berlin to the land of Bach, Goethe and Hegel that brought forth Bauhaus, Protestantism and the German Enlightenment.
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Last week the 1945 Rechnitz massacre hit the headlines after British journalist David Litchfield maintained that Countess Margit von Batthyany, partial heir to the Thyssen industrial family, had taken part in the atrocity. But such speculations belong to the boulevard press. The real issue is the scandalous role of the German postwar criminal justice system in letting the perpetrators escape Germany unharmed. By Stefan Klemp
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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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German-Turkish director Fatih Akin's "The Edge of Heaven" won the best screen play award at Cannes. Now showing in German cinemas, it is a light, bright film about death, an optimistic requiem full of little utopias. By Katja Nicodemus
Director Romuald Karmakar has made a film which reveals the Islamist mindset. Based on the lessons delivered by Imam Mohammed Fazazi, whose mosque in Hamburg was visited by the 9/11 pilots, it stretches for over two hours and provides almost nothing for the eye. Precisely this, says Eckhard Fuhr, makes it so effective.
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Hans Werner Henze's fourteenth opera "Phaedra" almost cost him his life. Now the premiere has taken place in Berlin. Volker Hagedorn visited the eighty-one-year-old composer at his home above the Tiber valley, where he has lived and worked since 1953.
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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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Cologne Cathedral looks back at a long and eventful history. The inauguration of Gerhard Richter's stained glass window for the South Transept adds a new chapter, bright with 72-colour, frame-breaking abstraction. By Petra Kipphoff
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The third anti-porn campaign of the women's feminist magazine Emma is absolutely necessary and, at the same time, hopelessly old-fashioned. You can't use the tools of the 70s to fight the pornographication of today's market - at least not if you want to win. By Iris Radisch
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"Yella", the new film by director Christian Petzold, hits the screens in Germany today. He talks to Christiane Peitz about working with actress Nina Hoss, abandoning Hitchcock, and his personal bugbear, the amphibian film.
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Thirty years ago, the kidnapping of German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Red Army Faction signalled the beginning of the Deutscher Herbst, the highpoint of German terrorism. Arno Widmann looks back on the culture of violence in the 1970s.
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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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The Berlin festival Tanz im August presents human swarms, wailing feedback and the dark side of the pas de deux. This is good for dance. By Katrin Bettina Müller
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