Maybe We'll All Go Mad

In the global world, the different peoples reveal their most dangerous common features in the shape of an almost archaic, bloody form of fundamentalism. 223 years after Lessing wrote his Nathan, the »parable of the rings«, in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 the Enlightenment seems to have imploded and religions are apparently once more giving the commands.

In her passionate essay Ulla Berkéwicz calls for the courage to care for what we would otherwise lose if we were not to resist the alliance of technocratic nihilism and archaic fanaticism. In the midst of a chain of action and reaction that is accelerating at an intoxicating pace she seeks to find orientation in a profound analysis of religious traditions, in an exegesis of sources from the Talmud, the Koran and the Bible, by studying historical and contemporary Islamic and Jewish sources and material in the mire of sects in the United States today.

Others have written on what divides Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Ulla Berkéwicz explores the common features of the three religions and the tendency for self-renunciation in all three. She highlights the properties these religions share when they »go crazy«, with the archaic fanaticism previously associated with the Germans. And into her analysis she weaves her own experiences and her own fiction. By means of the art of telling powerful stories she shows the simple violent solutions of the rabble rousers in the Occident and Orient up for what they are. It is first within the process of narration that the essay finds the freedom and multiplicity of meanings that does justice to the polyphony of individuals in our world. It reconciles scholarly reflection, myth and literature in a courageous attempt to intervene in a tale told of fear and yet one that nurtures the courage to resist any inclusion. In this way, Berkéwicz has created something quite new: a treatise in the finest tradition of the Enlightenment, a piece that grasps through narrative that which Reason alone cannot understand

Selected Foreign Editions

English edition released by Banyan Tree
 

Spanish edition released by Losada
 

Arabic edition released by Al-Kamel
 

Italian edition released by Casagrande
 

Dutch edition released by Aspekt
 

Greek edition released by Kastaniotis
 

Hebrew edition released by Hakibbutz