Turkey (Yazilama Yayinevi)
As we all know, it is not machines which employ machines but humans who build and use machines. Therefore it can no longer be accepted that machines increasingly worsen our living conditions although they were originally intended to improve them.
Even in the richest countries one can no longer perceive much improvement of everyday life through technology: The creative computer service provider lives the meager existence of a biblical day laborer, the high-tech physician rights reports on the rights of sick benefit recipients to receive charity; any modernization of production leads to mass dismissals instead of reduction of work time. But poorer regions are not even permitted to engage in this still relatively luxurious form of moaning; everything which cannot yet be done with those on a western payroll just gets outsourced. How is one supposed to storm machines in order to acquire them? Is it possible to maintain a modern division of labor while getting rid of the hierarchies, dependencies and injustices which adhere to them? What does industry, the wealth it creates and the dirt it discards have to do with freedom? The essay Machinenwinter risks being a literary polemic and speculative fantasy on how to make history with technology.
Maybe there is a god after all. What if he doesn’t like us?
A German movie director flees from an exhausting love affair. His sister is suspected by the government of being a radical Islamist planning an attack. His best friend from childhood days is a priest fighting the devil. And a woman who knows all three of them, but is more than a mere human, opens the door to the...
Tomorrow, everything is going to be better: Since the Age of Enlightenment, this slogan identifies disciples of social progress, while those of the dark ages bark about how everything was better in the olden days. Some bank on science and technology to enhance freedom, wealth, education, and beauty, others on tradition, blood, land, family, fatherland, and other such ancestral chatter so that...
Dietmar Dath, »the most productive and most radical writer in Germany« (Thomas Lindemann, Die Welt) on the revolutionary democrat Rosa Luxemburg.
Denmark (Rosenkilde)
US paperback edition (DoppelHouse), Italy (Nero Editions), Serbia (VBZ), Turkey (Is Kültür)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: English world rights (Seagull)
Russia (Text)
»I only produce shit nowadays,« reads a diary entry by Arno Schmidt, meaning: journalistic texts for newspapers. Since 1990, Dietmar Dath has published heaps of – well: journalistic, satirical, and essayistic texts and by doing so has created his very own fan base.
Like very few others, he manages to connect Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Bourdieu, pop culture to...
Greece (Melani)
»Dear Sonja,« David writes in these enlightening and desperate letters to a revered classmate from days long gone, »looking back isn’t always the best idea: Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s...