Suhrkamp Insel

Theodor W. Adorno

Aspects of Contemporary Right-Wing Radicalism

On 6 April 1967 Theodor W. Adorno gave a lecture at the University of Vienna as a guest of the Socialist Students of Austria, a lecture which, from today’s point of view, is not only of historical interest. Against the backdrop of the rise of the NPD, which in the first two years after its founding in November 1964 had already seen surprising success at the polls, Adorno analyses the goals, resources, and tactics of the new right-wing radicalism of his time. Contrasting it with »old« Nazi-Fascism, he gives a close examination of the reasons for which extreme right-wing movements were finding a positive reception – 20 years after the end of the war – in segments of the population of the Federal Republic.

Friedrich Ani

All The Empty Rooms

In Friedrich Ani’s new novel, »the four« must spring into action: Polonius Fischer (the former monk), Tabor Süden (the returned missing person’s investigator), Jakob Franck (the former inspector, now retired, but still the deliverer of the worst news) and Fariza Nasri (the civil servant with Syrian roots, saved from her banishment to the provinces). All of them must employ their unique methods to solve the murder of a woman and the beating death of a police officer, incidents which receive great attention after igniting social and political debates (coming from the right) about the incompetence of the police, migrant children, east and west Germany, and »the system«.

Nils Binnberg

I have had enough!

»I suffer from orthorexia nervosa. It is a concept I only became familiar with recently and it describes an obsession with eating healthily. That sounds good, you might say? But it is not. I slavishly follow each new health edict. By turning my back on everyday foods, I have started to feel as if I am slowly killing myself. Incidentally, I am only one of millions affected in Germany. At lunchtime we are fine talking freely about S & M sex à la Fifty Shades of Grey. But if a breadbasket is passed around, we become suddenly tense.

Felix Bohr

The War Criminals’ Lobby

Immediately after the Second World War, National Socialist war criminals were taken into custody by many Western European countries. Given the Federal Republic of Germany’s links to the West, the majority were released. In Italy and the Netherlands alone, five Germans remained in police custody: SS man Herbert Kappler as the Gestapo commander responsible for the Ardeatine massacre, and the »Breda Four« who had played a significant role in the murder of Dutch Jews. High-ranking German politicians, among them the social democrat German Chancellors Brandt and Schmidt, aided in securing their release.

Nora Bossong

Protected Area

2017: After postings with the UN in New York and Burundi, Mira is working for the United Nations Office at Geneva and mediates talks on the reunification of Cyprus. At a reception at the luxury hotel Beau-Rivage, she encounters Milan, with whose family she lived for a few months after her parents’ separation in 1994. Even though Milan is married with a daughter and is soon going to move his family to The Hague, the two begin an affair.

Volker Braun

Coup

Considering contemporary conditions, what possibilities does a writer have of effecting change? On intimate terms with all literary traditions, Volker Braun makes use of tried and tested prose forms to come closer to an answer: aphorisms, pieces of dialogue, quotes. In his workshop dreams, puzzling fragments, and stubborn truths all come to light.

Volker Braun

Relocating the Secret Point

Relocating the Secret Point gathers underground texts and speeches. The collection opens with a satire of expatriation written in January 1977 and is followed by the radical pamphlet Büchner’s Letters; it contains essays on Shakespeare and Rimbaud, Goethe and Kafka: poetry and politics, and points to a shift in the work that will grow into a radical change.

Simone Buchholz

Mexico Ring

In Hamburg cars are burning. Set alight at random every night. But one night on the Mexico Ring, a ghetto of office high-rises to the north of the city, a person is still in his Fiat as it starts to blaze: Nouri Saroukhan, the lost son of a Bremen gangster family. Did he regret running away from his family? Had they started the blaze? And why are gangster youths from Bremen turning up dead in Hamburg?

Paul Celan

Poems

Celan’s collected poems – for the first time in their entirety and with new commentary. Close to 60 more poems than the 2003 edition. The history of their origins, sources, cross-references: broken down with summaries and individual notes.

Hg.: Luca Corchia, Stefan Müller-Doohm, William Outhwaite

Habermas Global

Jürgen Habermas' writings have found an international audience – and not only in academic circles but readers who are interested in politics. The current volume sees the international reception history of the prominent philosopher and public intellectual illuminated by more than 30 authors, who represent more than 15 language and scientific cultures. In so doing, for the first time ever this edition grants a comprehensive look at the international impact of Habermas’ thought, while simultaneously casting a new light on all of his work, which is inseparable from his concept of communicative rationality.

Ann Cotten

Lyophilia

Ann Cotten has grown up, a fact which catapults us far into the future. Her strangely labyrinthine yet respectful way of confronting problems still shows traces of the experiences she gathered as a young poet.

Juan Danilo

Ceviche. The Cookbook

The legendary Peruvian dish ceviche – fish marinated in lime juice and salt – is currently becoming a major trend in international gastronomy. This is not surprising, as ceviche is a culinary sensation: a sophisticated and fresh dish with lots of possible variations – a true explosion of flavour and colour.

Gabriele Diechler

Lavender Dreams

A picturesque village in the Provence, not far from Grasse, the world capital of perfume. But Julia isn’t here to enjoy the beauty of the landscape: her life is falling apart, and she has come here in search of the truth …

Ellen Dunne

Black Soul

A drowned Irish man is fished out of the Schwabinger Bach – a stream in the English Garden in Munich. There is no evidential material, but motives galore. Not the ideal starting position for Patsy Logan, the German-Irish detective chief inspector with the Munich homicide squad. She has to call on her instincts more than ever – but those instincts are wavering just when she needs them.

Nana Ekvtimishvili

The Pear Field

The Pear Field takes place in the 1990s in Tbilisi, capital of the recently independent country of Georgia. At the heart of the novel is the “School for Idiots”, a boarding school for “mentally deficient children”, actually visitied mostly by children whose parents are either dead or who have emigrated for economic reasons. Even the teachers leave the children and teens to their own devices.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

A Handful of Anecdotes

»It is hard to shake off one’s date of birth. M. drags his around with him, too.« The first twenty years of life are baggage that a person is forever stuck with. But memory is a fragmentary and untrustworthy guide. That is why the author avails himself of the freedom of stage director and collage-maker, gathering together themes, images, and anecdotes into an Opus incertum. That is how the ancient Romans referred to a particular construction technique: »irregular work«.

Urs Faes

The Twelve Days of Christmas

After years abroad a man returns to the forlorn yet familiar valley in the Black Forest. He walks the old paths through the heavy snow, remembers the bitter inheritance dispute surrounding his father’s farm, and Minna, who rejected him for his brother. He listens for the call of the dark goblins, who during the twelve days of Christmas, that strange space of time between Christmas and the Epiphany, commit their deeds, gazes into the ceaselessly falling white, and, marked by illness, waits for his brother in order to finally have a conciliatory talk.

Yannic Han Biao Federer

And Everything is Like Paper Mâché

It is the late summer of 2001 in the backwoods of Baden. On the television, there are images of the World Trade Centre collapsing. Jian is sixteen and in love with Sarah, but sleeps with Anna who has just broken up with Frank. After that, Sarah doesn’t want to have anything to do with Jian anymore, nor Jian with Anna, and Frank is caught up in his own self. Fifteen years later Anna is in a love-triangle, Frank is hidden away in the forest, and Jian comes across Sarah again in paparazzi photos. They have long since lost track of one another and yet Jian continues to narrate how their shared story might run.

Angelika Felenda

Autumn Storm

Investigations in two murder cases lead the unflappable Munich Detective Reitmeyer into the circles of Russian Monarchists in exile who had settled in the city after the October Revolution. And it is these very circles that his best friend, lawyer Sepp Leitner, has his eye out for the daughter of a distinguished Russian nobleman, to top up his salary.  But what does the disappearance of Anya Alexandrova have to do with the two dead men?

Gunther Geltinger

Fuel

This isn’t the first time Alexander and Vinz have taken a trip together because their relationship has reached a crisis point. The road trip through South Africa is meant to give them clarity, and Vinz, the writer, hopes to get a new idea for a novel. Careening past street markets, Chicken Inns and hitchhikers, the two Germans make their way through a country where wealth and poverty collide, where homosexuality is taboo, and where they must face up to the part they too play in the general obliviousness of the white tourist.