Suhrkamp Insel

Ingeborg Bachmann

The Thirtieth Year

In 1956, at 30 years of age, Ingeborg Bachman began with the first drafts for the book, which is now to published in the Salzburger Bachmann Edition. It would take five years until all seven stories had been submitted to Piper Verlag ready for publication in the spring of 1961 and the first volume could be published in July that same year.

Zsófia Bán

Keep Breathing

In 1912, Franz Reichelt stands on the Eiffel Tower clad in his home-made parachute, and hesitates, his breath billowing in the cold, »chemistry and scratch marks pulsate like thick snowfall« in the old black and white photograph. Robika, who would be a seventh grader now if he had a concept of time and went to school, has an obsession: Every week he chooses seven bars of white soap in Mama Roza’s store.

Polina Barskova

Living Pictures

They refuse to seek shelter in the cellar and wait it out in the dark, draughty art gallery, defying the cold and the hunger. Mojsej, 25, and Antonina, 37, work at Leningrad’s Hermitage, one of the most beautiful museums of fine arts in the world. In the winter of 1941/42, it becomes their last refuge.

Priya Basil

In Us and Now

This book is a search. For a position, a community, a perspective. Led by the memories of what she experienced as the daughter of a patriarchal Indian family, Priya Basil describes the oppression of women, as well as their incredible resourcefulness, and discusses the questions that need to be answered on the way to justice and equality. In Us and Now is at once a self-discovery of elegant beauty and brilliant analysis.

Zoë Beck

Paradise City

Germany in the near future. The coasts are flooded, large parts of the country are depopulated and nature is reclaiming deserted communities. Berlin is nothing but a backdrop for tourists. The government has moved to Frankfurt, which has merged with the entire Rhine Main Area to become one single megacity. In those places where infrastructure exists, it works flawlessly. Virtually all life is controlled by algorithms. Everyone is fine – as long as they don’t ask any questions.

Marcel Beyer

Demon Removal Service

There is a performance at the trashy theatre. Hildegard Knef gets in a car. Rudolph Moshammer carries his Yorkshire Terrier around Munich. S. T. Coleridge makes a joke about Cologne. Works of art disappear. Something is rattling the window. Morning, noon, night. The Blackbird Pope. The people are starting to talk things. Music plays at the waste collection point. Elvis sweeps the driveway once more. I only read horse crime novels now and look for language in the grey area. The sleep laboratory at Potsdamer Platz. Hawthorn, majoram, gorse...

Hans Blumenberg

Reality and Realism

What do we mean when speaking about reality? What does realism of thoughts mean? How do humans come in contact with reality and become conscious of it? These fundamental questions occupied Hans Blumenberg all through his life, and they remained important undercurrents in many of his books. He never published a monograph about these topics, but he had been planning to do so, as documents in his literary estates show.

Nina Bußmann

Thicket

Only a very few people manage to get sober on their own. If you want to stop drinking, you should connect with a group. Addict Ruth knows phrases like these, but she doesn’t believe in them. She manages best on her own. However, when she wakes up in hospital after a heavy fall, she needs support and turns to a fellow patient, Katja.

Sigrid Damm

Goethe and Carl August

Sigrid Damm tells the exciting story, rich in contradictions, highs and lows, personal and political vicissitudes, of the more than fifty years of friendship between Goethe and the Weimar Duke Carl August.

Sigrid Damm

Hiking – A Quiet Rush

A sixty-year-old woman and a thirty-year-old man are hiking in the solitude of the far north for seven days, in the archaic landscape of Swedish Lapland, the home of the Sami people, the last indigenous people in Europe.

Hans Peter Duerr

This Side of Eden

Some people experience the presence of something divine when they listen to a piece of music. Others feel like they are possessed by a strange power when speaking in tongues or they feel a connection to the other side when they find themselves in deep trance and ecstasy. The mysterious, unfathomable can cause dread and fear but at the same time it fascinates us.

Urs Faes

Daytimes

A man and a woman meet late in life and experience once again deep affection and happiness, in everyday life and on travels to the landscape of his youth – the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. But their delights are soon joined by the infirmities of old age, Jakov becomes increasingly forgetful.

Valerie Fritsch

Heart Valves by Johnson & Johnson

Due to a genetic defect, Alma and Friedrich’s baby is unable to feel pain. In constant worry about their son Emil, it’s mainly Alma who incessantly checks that his body is unharmed. Every night she palpates Emil’s body so as not to overlook any wounds and there is nothing the young mother fears more than an invisible injury to an organ that goes unnoticed.

Thomas Fuchs

Defence of Humanity

With the advancements of artificial intelligence, the digitalisation of the lived-in world and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes humans seem more and more like a product of data and algorithms.

Durs Grünbein

Beyond Literature

In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, poet Durs Grünbein deals with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since the moment he started to perceive his own position within the history of his nation, his language community and his family as historic: How is it possible that HISTORY, the fetish of the humanities since Hegel and Marx, determines the individual imagination into the private niches, into the ludic drive of poetry? Shouldn’t its poetry look at the world with its own, sovereign eyes instead?

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

»The Prose of the World«

Philosopher and translator, critic and writer, art agent and encyclopaedist: Denis Diderot, born in Champagne in 1713, died in Paris in 1784, was one of the defining figures of the movement that went down in history as the European Age of Enlightenment. But what is the vanishing point of his multifarious œuvre, which is characterised by downright centrifugal dynamics – unlike the works of his contemporaries Voltaire and Rousseau, Schiller, Kant and Hume?

Hermann Hesse

»›Great Times‹ Leave Behind Great Piles of Rubble«

This volume comprising more than 500 letters sets in few months after the begin of World War II. These letters depict in many dramatic episodes the extent to which Hermann Hesse and his German publisher Peter Suhrkamp were affected by the repressions of the Nazi regime. At least equally as gripping are Hesse’s replies to numerous German correspondents who described their fates vividly to the poet, who had been living in Switzerland since 1912, and asked him for advice and help.

Gunnar Hindrichs

On Critical Theory

Critical theory is perspicacious nonsense. Criticism means examining, differentiating, evaluation. Theory means a knowledge structure. According to Kant, criticism therefore constitutes a »propaedeutic« to theory.

Axel Honneth

The Poverty of Our Freedom

In his new book, Axel Honneth shows what more there is to learn from the philosophical tradition about a reasonable notion of freedom, what is obstructing the implementation of such a freedom and from where we could ultimately get suggestions on a further realisation of freedom.

Rafael Horzon

The New Book

Ten years after Rafael Horzon’s successful autobiography The White Book not much has been reported about the former darling of Berlin’s intelligentsia. It’s become too quiet, in his opinion. And so, he brings himself to try once more: With a new book, he wants to set himself up as the most important intellectual of the 21st century; indeed, even finally win the much longed-for Nobel Prize. But he can’t think of anything to write about.