Twenty-five years after his cult TV series, Kir Royal, director Helmut Dietl has now come released a sort of ?sequel? for the big screen. Zettl focuses on the high-flying career of a ruthless media man in Berlin. As satire, however, the frigid figures in Zettl fail to warm up to viewers. ...
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Reviled as a racist by some, celebrated as a defender of the west by others, Thilo Sarrazin has written a book on the slow death by immigration of the German republic. He must be thrilled that "Germany is doing away with itself" is flying off the shelves; less so that it has been almost uniformly slated by press and politicians alike. For this though, the former SPD finance senator and Bundesbank board member only has himself to blame. By Joachim Güntner
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Update: The German pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale is dedicated to Christoph Schlingensief who died in August last year, aged just 49. Regarded by many as a genius, for others he was a provocateur or merely a con artist. While still undergoing chemotherapy he travelled to Burkino Faso to oversee work on the opera village which is being built there on his instigation. His memoirs are due to be published in September. He talked to Thomas David about his obsession with Africa, the importance of disturbing the peace and why he didn't become the man he wanted to be.
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Former East-German novelist Christa Wolf has spent a lifetime writing against forgetting and the repression of guilt. But the will to remember, it seems, has not been enough to prevent her from doing exactly that. Her biographer Jörg Magenau reviews her new autobiographical novel "Stadt der Engel", which ends in Death Valley. Perhaps 'dead end' would have been more to the point. Photo:©Susanne Schleyer
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Robert Schumann was born 200 years ago on June 8. The conductor and composer Heinz Holliger, who has devoted his life to the study of Romantic master, talks to Claus Spahn about the his labyrinthine imagination, erudition and incredible modernity. He also dispels a string of clichees that have consigned so much of the Schumann's work to musical oblivion.
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Joachim Gauck was a leading oppositional figure in the GDR. After the fall of the Wall he became the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Files. He is now director of the "Against Forgetting – For Democracy" association in Berlin and has just been nominated as a candidate for the next German president. He talks to Joachim Günther about Ossis and Wessis, opposition, conformism, and the long-term psychological effects of a dictatorial regime.
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As rector of the Albert Ludwig University in the winter of 1933/34, Martin Heidegger gave a seminar which was said to contain decisive evidence of the total identification of his teachings with the principles of Hitlerism. Now, thanks to his son Hermann Heidegger, the secret transcripts of this seminar "On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State" have been published for the first time. By Alexander Kissler
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Since its publication in January, Helene Hegemann's novel "Axolotl Roadkill" has been at the centre of a debate whose vagaries of terminology have allowed the seriousness of the case to be downplayed. Philipp Theisohn wishes the literary establishment would drop all its talk of intertextuality in favour of a more democratic category: plagiarism.
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The director Werner Herzog is the president of the jury at this, the 60th Berlinale. Katja Nicodemus met him in Los Angeles to discuss burning Lilliputians, how it feels like to be unsuccessfully shot at, and the life of a lone Bavarian wolf in Hollywood.
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Filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge is no optimist, but he knows ways out of the present. Freitag magazine engages him in a conversation about the World Wide Web, dragonflies, the belief in better human beings and why he likes "gardener" as a job description.
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Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht was one of Germany's most influential musicologists. His magnum opus "Music in the Occident" sits on the shelves of many a music lover. Ten years after his death, historian Boris von Haken has now revealed that Eggebrecht was involved in mass shootings of Jews during the Second World War.
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The history of German terrorism was also the story of the amour fou between Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader. But this affair caused the breakup of Ensslin's relationship with Bernward Vesper, who was also the father of her child. Their letters, dating from 1968/69, while Ensslin was in Stammheim, offer profound insights into the political pathology of the time. By Gerd Koenen.
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The path of gentrification has, more often than not, been paved by artists. But Hamburg's creative community wants to jam the economic development machine instead. Here is their manifesto.
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Claus Leggewie and Harald Welzer have written a book about the end of the world as we knew it. Jan Feddersen grills them on climate change and the role of democracy in a political system that has had no new ideas since the fall of the Wall.
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"Herta Müller has eyes like spotlights that drive out the darkness night after night." So begins Verena Auffermann's portrait of this year's literary Nobel laureate, in her book about 99 women writers, "Leidenschaften".
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Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu celebrates Herta Müller's Nobel Prize, raising his glass to a writer with an inner sword and a literary style that is pure poetry.
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