Suhrkamp Insel

Friedrich Ani

The Fool and His Machine

Tabor Süden started out as a policeman before moving into private detective work, becoming an experienced specialist in missing persons cases. What he really wanted was to walk away forever from investigative work after the last case in which one of his colleagues lost his life.

Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger

»Write down everything that is true«

The hitherto unpublished and unknown correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Magnus Enzensberger allows one to relive how, after the Second World War, two of the most prominent writers in the German language chose to depict and regard the world, literature and the publishing industry, but also how they wished to present and be regarded themselves.

Wolfgang Bauer

Fracture Zones

It is the year 2018. While in Europe people are still living in a comfort zone, war rages in other regions of the world, state institutions crumble, millions of people are suffering from hunger. The Zeit newspaper journalist, Wolfgang Bauer has been exploring these fracture zones for years. In his new book, he arranges his most penetrating reportage pieces: the North Korean ghost-ships that wash up on the west coast of Japan; the »Maniac«, a serial killer in Russia’s Volga region; or the odyssey of Pakistani sailors fallen into the hands of pirates at the Horn of Africa. However, this book does also contain stories of hope, such as the IT consultant from Minnesota who returns to his Somali homeland to found a state.

Ulla Berkéwicz

Beyond Script

Based on Vedic, Jewish and mathematictopological knowledge, Ulla Berkéwicz’ new work, comprised of two corresponding parts which reflect each other, invites us to discern what restricts our consciousness.

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.

Ernst Bloch

The Spirit of Utopia

In the summer of 1918 the world is knee-deep in blood: the war has already claimed millions of victims, the Spanish influenza is spreading, in Russia the revolution is turning into a civil war. The old order of Europe is teetering and about to fall. A whole generation – the Generation Y of the last century – is standing on its shattered remains and gazing into an uncertain future.

Hans Blumenberg

Phenomenological Writings 1981-1988

On the 27th of April 1988, the 50th anniversary of the death of Edmund Husserl, Hans Blumenberg noted: »The century now rushing towards its end will be regarded with hindsight by philosophy-historians as the ‘century’ of Phenomenology.« This prognosis is also an indicator of his own philosophical legacy: a phenomenological anthropology as developed by Blumenberg throughout his lifelong debate with the philosophy of Husserl. A highly productive phase of this debate dates back to the beginning of the 1980s after Blumenberg had completed his major studies of metaphor and myth and had began to devote himself intensely to anthropological questions.

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

Crusade with a Dog

In her new volume of poetry, Nora Bossong travels from small-town Germany to the Mediterranean and onwards into the Holy Land and beyond. Her natural manner of movement a shifting back and forth in time. Hungry for experience, she explores poetic scenes from a past hundred of years old and a distilled present. Almost as if by chance, she directs her lens on people, places and traditions, describing them with subtle humour and sensitivity while leaving their secrets intact.

Bernd Brunner

The Book of Pomegranates

Next to olives, figs, grapes and dates, the pomegranate belongs to the earliest fruit to be cultivated by humankind. Until today, it is surrounded by mysteries. Was the »forbidden apple« with which Eve tempted Adam actually a pomegranate? Is the pomegranate – botanically speaking – even an »apple«? Is it the universal remedy which many believe it to be? Most likely, the origin of the pomegranate lies in the area south of the Caspian Sea, and its traditional area of cultivation spans from the Himalayas to the Mediterranean. Its rich associations, especially as a symbol of fertility, run through the cultures of antiquity like a golden thread; later, it was used as an attribute of the Madonna figure and in still lives in Renaissance paintings until it was replaced by citrus fruit, which were much easier to process.

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?

Michael Butter

»Nothing is as it seems«

According to most recent empirical studies, fifty percent of the US-American population and a smaller, but not insignificant number of Germans believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Personalities like David Icke or Alex Jones enjoy celebrity status; in his TV show the latter chats to Donald Trump, who for his part undermines the belief in shared interpretations with his attacks on the »Fake-News Media«.

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.

Zoltán Danyi

The Carcass Remover

They had heard about five dead foxes, lying in the road by the Hungarian-Serbian border. But when the men from the disposal unit arrive, there are dozens of carcasses, dogs and cats, too – shot, it seems, by border guards to pass the time. The war in the Balkans is long over, and yet incidents like these haul the narrator back into his past.

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 …

Olaf Nils Dube

Bees and Humans

What is a person who dreams of a simple life, and is almost suffocating in the pursuit of a career, to do? Stuck in the wrong life; this feeling plagued Olaf Nils Dube for years. When he was in his mid-thirties, he gathered his courage, resigned from his position of responsibility, and left his spacious apartment in Prenzlauer Berg for a circus caravan. He took up beekeeping; like many other young people these days, incidentally. Back then he heard from all sides: »You can’t make a living from that!« And yet that is just what Dube went on to do, with the help of his bees. For they, after about ten million years of evolution history, are after all experts in survival!

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 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«.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Survival Artists

The 20th century was the heyday of writers who had survived state terror and purges with all the ethical and political ambivalences that this entailed. How did they manage to do that? Were they too steadfast to bend to the powers that be? Did they owe their survival to their foresight, their intelligence or sharpness, their belief in themselves, their connections or their tactical skill? Was it serendipitous circumstances bordering on a miracle that helped them escape from prison, camps and death, or was it strategies that spanned from ingratiation to disguise? If only it was possible to make a clear-cut distinction!