Germany
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Fifty Shades of Red January 31, 2024
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is a novel of love—her first. It is also the first of her many celebrated fictions to explicitly take on a latent idée fixe of her literary career: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. The sudden coll...
What Happens Where Free Speech Is Unprotected January 04, 2024
C.j. hopkins is one of the very few Americans to follow through on the quadrennial promise, sworn by countless millions, to leave the country because they didn’t like the result of a particular general election.You probably haven’t heard of C. J. Hop...
Reichs, From First to Third July 17, 2023
Five hundred years ago, the land we now call Germany existed as the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” It wasn’t a real empire and certainly wasn’t holy or Roman or even particularly German. It was rather a hodgepodge of fiefdoms, creeds and n...
What Really Happened Inside This Nazi Brothel? July 07, 2023
The brothel owner Kitty Schmidt began to sneak portions of her savings out of Nazi Germany sometime in the mid-1930s, often by sending her girls to London with cash sewn in their underwear. By 1938, officials had caught on, but thanks to her police c...
Auf Wiedersehen, Napoleon July 07, 2023
In 1867, shortly after Prussia’s decisive military victories over Denmark (in 1864) and Austria (in 1866), a dinner guest asked the Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, about the prospect of a further armed conflict, this time against France. ...
J’Accuse: The Case That Never Closes June 07, 2023
We can spend all of our lives paying for some decisions. In the case of a nation, the process of coming to terms with such decisions and taking responsibility for their consequences is the work of generations, and it requires eternal vigilance. This ...
Calm Down About 'The Little Mermaid' June 05, 2023
‘I do not think we do our children any favours by pretending that slavery didn’t exist,’ wrote Royal Academy of Dramatic Art chair Marcus Ryder, in a blog about the newly remade Disney adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Merm...
Poetry Has Lost Its Violence June 02, 2023
Jerome Rothenberg, aged 91, has made immeasurable contributions to American poetry over the past seven decades. Born in New York in 1931, he first came onto the scene in 1959 with New Young German Poets, the unintended fruit of his just-completed ser...
Vichy’s Long Shadow June 02, 2023
On 23 July 1945 the 89-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, until recently head of the French state, went on trial for his life before a specially convened High Court in Paris, accused of attacking national security and collusion with Nazi Germany amoun...
The Skeptic June 01, 2023
There are some books that are so essential to learning something new that they become like an extension of your body. Over 20 years ago, when I was a college student attempting to learn Arabic, that book was the Hans Wehr Modern Arabic-English Dictio...
Ian Penman's Fassbinder is a Love Letter to Counterculture May 16, 2023
One day in the mid-’70s on an air force base in “flattest, dullest” Norfolk, England, an African-American airmen shared some of his deep Southern blues records with a young, white English boy named Ian Penman. The meeting was more or less random, occ...
Deconstructing a Giant of the Screen May 16, 2023
Ahard man to keep up with, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Born in Bavaria just as the Second World War was ending, he directed more than 40 films and 15 plays. He wrote the scripts for many of them, as well as designing the sets — starring in more than a ...
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Life in Pieces May 11, 2023
PICTURE THIS: Camera slowly panning across shelves littered with dog-eared paperbacks, soiled scripts, handwritten corrections, framed stills, loose pills. A copy of Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (a book of personal notes on—to?—the la...
Battle Royale May 10, 2023
Two houses, each alike in indignity. For there can be no dignity when the world knows your business because your exiled brother and his American wife are complaining about you to the media. The Meghan and Harry saga is what Sigmund Freud and Elizabet...
If One Woman Told the Truth about Her Life May 03, 2023
Sometime in 1969, my grandmother tried to decapitate her good friend Ella Winter. My father was there; I know that. I imagine him wearing the blue corduroy suit he wore at his wedding; I’m sure he didn’t. I imagine him humiliated.Muriel Rukeyser, so ...
Central Europe Has Shaped Our Culture For Centuries May 03, 2023
It is easy to overlook the importance of Central Europe, writes Martyn Rady at the start of this fascinating book. For some modern writers the region is best typified by similarities, or differences, over postboxes, popular preferences for spirits ov...
Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag April 28, 2023
Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertis...
Italy’s Non-Cancel Culture April 25, 2023
On the periphery of Rome, not far from the Vatican, stands a towering obelisk named for Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator and ally of Adolf Hitler. On a recent visit to the city, my taxi driver knew exactly where it was and found nothing rem...
Honecker’s Hidden Pleasures April 13, 2023
I was asking my father for a bit of help with my homework, sticking newspaper cuttings into a scrapbook. He was flabbergasted when he saw that the subject was the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the event in 1954 which marked the end of the French presence in...
A Freewheeling Study of Fassbinder's Allure April 12, 2023
Adream prospect. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the short-lived, self-destructive wunderkind who made movies about love as masochism, pain as an inevitable condition and history as a dire weight upon his native Germany, has long been in need of an equally...
The Odd Knight of the Cinnamon Shops April 11, 2023
On Nov. 19, 1942, at the age of 50, Bruno Schulz, writer, artist, and idiosyncratic dreamer, was murdered in the ghetto of Drohobycz, Galicia. Earlier that month, Felix Landau, the SS officer who forced Schulz to produce works of art for him, had sho...
Reimagining Underground Rave Culture April 07, 2023
echno was invented by a group of Black artists from Detroit in the early nineteen-eighties. The scene and the sound globalized rapidly, but as an American subculture early electronic dance music was characterized by a science-fictional Futurism pursu...
The Golden Age of Aerospace April 06, 2023
Long before the fall of Berlin at the end of World War II, American military intelligence had begun planning to steal advanced Nazi technology. The German state was renowned for its technological prowess, and its propaganda extolled the country’s dev...
What Happened to Goths? April 05, 2023
The original Goths came out of Germany and descended on Rome in August 410, sacking the eternal city. Their late 20th century namesakes emerged from Leeds, Crawley, Northampton and other bleak provincial towns, bringing their look of black clothes an...
Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Borderless Brilliance April 04, 2023
Paying tribute to the visionary Yellow Magic Orchestra member and Oscar-winning composer, who died last month at 71 from cancer.Most people would identify Düsseldorf, Germany, or Detroit—hometowns of Kraftwerk and Cybotron, respectively—as the birthp...
