There is hardly a theatrical profession that has recently been so fostered, celebrated, loaded with prizes and grants as young dramatists....
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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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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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UPDATE: The German Book Prize 2009 has been awarded to Katrin Schmidt for her novel "You're Not Going to Die". Read excerpts from all the shortlisted titles - including one from the Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller's novel "Everything I Own I Carry With Me".
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Like a hunter-gatherer, Volker Michels has been foraging for traces of the life and work of author Hermann Hesse for thirty years now. For his private Hesse archive in Offenbach, he collects and cross-references all of Hesse's letters, pictures and manuscripts he can find. Roman Bucheli portrays an archivist on the brink of obsession. (Image © Gret Widmann)
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Ingo Schulze has reached new literary heights in his latest collection of short stories. Full of digressions and distractions, full of calculated humility, Schulze turns what seems to be non-art into art in its highest form. By Ulrich Greiner
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Germany as a culture does not correspond to the German nation. Which means that the much-quoted truth that the Germans were united by their literature or their language has always also been a lie. For German-Iranian writer Navid Kermani the most German of German writers is none other than Franz Kafka.
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Ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has just written his memoirs "Decisions", in which he relates at length what a smashing job he made of everything. And along the way he reveals a singular lack of literary talent. Writer Georg M. Oswald journeys into a rosy past.
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With this story, journalist Kathrin Passig won one of the most prestigious literary awards in German letters, the Ingeborg Bachman Prize. (Photo © Johannes Jander)
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The well-loved German poet and artist Robert Gernhardt died on June 30, 2006. We publish a selection of his poems in English with the kind permission of his translator Ursula Runde, and several drawings from Gernhardt's "German Readers" series.
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German star comic artist Ralf König on burqas in Germany, the Pope in Cologne and his gay Islamist satire "Jinn Jinn". An interview with Wieland Freund.
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