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In March 1925, 21-year-old Dr. Theodor Wiesengrund moves to Vienna for a few months to continue his training in composition with Alban Berg. Berg introduces him to the Vienna string quartet and its 28-year-old lead violinist Rudolf Kolisch, one of the most important interpreters of the New Music of the Schönberg school. Adorno and Kolisch quickly become friends and begin an extensive...

»They belong to us, they are one of us and we want them in« – Yuri Andrukhovych had been waiting for this sentence, which presented the prospect of EU membership to his country, for many years. It was uttered in Brussels, three days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. »A deep exhale – amidst the blaring sirens.«

Twenty years ago, his brilliant volume of essays My Final...

A narrator, possibly a former monk, looks back on his life: there wasn’t any real space for childhood and youth in it, his father and mother did not play the role intended for them. His path led him from faith to doubt, from the village to the city. He escaped the city into the solitude of his hermitage, where he tries to put into words what leaves him bewildered, investigates the...

For the young Ingeborg Bachmann and her generation, the great hope after the war soon proved deceptive. The themes in Bachmann's first volume of poetry, Deferred Time (1953), are representative of the experience that defines writing after 1945: Departure and farewell, guilt and memory. In the dramatic gestures and memorable images of her poetic language, this experience found a...

Due to the richness and novelty of the sources, this biography is the first to provide comprehensive information about Paul Celan’s entire life in text and image. It thus enters a field of tension and faces a twofold challenge: for Celan resolutely rejected the biographical, especially the biographical approach to his poetry, and was also decidedly sceptical about the medium of...

Hannah Arendt, a highly acclaimed philosophical author, and Heinrich Blücher, a man with revolutionary ambitions, met in Paris in 1936 as political outcasts, she because of her Jewishness and he on the grounds of his previous involvement with socialism and communism. While Arendt had been raised in Königsberg in a Jewish family of high standards, in which political optimism and...

In the heart of London, documentary filmmaker Niall witnesses a bestial attack on a young man, committed by jihadists. As he investigates the background of this act for a reportage, he gets caught up in a maelstrom of fear and violence, fuelled by political machinations and the media. He has no idea how much his life is interwoven with the terrorist act until it unravels...

Edvard is going to be fifteen soon and to his annoyance he is not yet the cool guy he would like to be: he has no hair on his chest, his voice is much too high-pitched and Constanze is not the least bit interested in him. To get to her, Edvard creates a fake social media profile pretending to be Jason from Chicago. What sounds like an ingenious plan at first soon begins to snowball...

The camp commander announces the death sentence. At that very moment, the prisoner Mala Zimetbaum cuts her wrists with a razor blade. An SS man grabs her by the arm. Mala tears herself free,...

»Everything must change for everything to remain the same.« The famous quote from the novel The Leopard is somewhat of an unofficial motto of moderate conservatism. Parties like the CDU came to terms with change and proved to be anchors of stability. Today, it is no longer certain that the centre-right will hold: Do its representatives continue to rely on balance...

The increasingly number of crises in rapid succession has a somewhat eschatological quality. We have known for a long time that our non-sustainable model is no longer tenable. Yet many climate activists and sustainability researchers insist that a socio-ecological transformation can still prevent the worst.

This promise, Ingolfur Blühdorn argues, fails to recognise the reality...

For more than three decades, Hans Blumenberg and Reinhart Koselleck maintained a correspondence that was characterized by mutual affection but also by distance. It shows two academic protagonists discuss the founding of universities and interdisciplinarity in times of university reform – and two sensitive scholars trying to communicate central aspects of their research: conceptual...

Emma Erdling is notoriously broke. It was only with the support of her childless great-aunt that she was able to set up her own PI business under the alias »Andreas von Erdling« in the most expensive district of the city, even though she never intended to solve real cases. Instead, she stages her life as a soap opera and herself as a tough, left-wing investigator on social media,...

A childlike disposition coupled with deep melancholy, a somewhat eccentric outsider, a politically inconvenient mind: Caspar David Friedrich – born in Greifswald, controversial during his lifetime, forgotten for half a century after his death, now the most important painter of German Romanticism.

In his concise biography, Boris von Brauchitsch describes how Caspar David...

His father, born in 1933, only talks about the Nazi era when Paul asks him about it. About the National Political Institute of Education, the Napola, about the Jewish furrier at the market and about his uncle. Uncle Paul, after whom the son is named and who was a district manager for the NSDAP. The son, born in 1980 as the youngest of eight children, finds only a slim file in the Federal...

A moving novel about the highly dramatic life of a young mother who is befallen by many strokes of fate – until she is forced to send her children away and work as a German spy during World War I.

Florence was very young when she was married to a priest who enforces strict rules in his home. When she seeks comfort and refuge with another man, her husband...

Is it the ancestors that are making the air heavy, crowding around the island? In the form of people, clouds, winds, fish, birds of the mountains, birds of the coast, migratory birds and seabirds that come to Hawaii to flirt, lay eggs, rest and then retreat back to the open sea?

Ancestral Destructions deals with the narrator's spiritual and material prehistory: that is...

The volume contains Sigrid Damm’s essayistic works created over the span of four decades and is accompanied by an introduction by the German philologist and writer Heinrich Detering.

It includes recent essays on Hermann Hesse, Ulrich Schacht, the film Leuchte, mein Stern, leuchte, works on the Totentanz cycle by the painter Lutz Friedel and...

»I stood by the window and waited for the sun to set, because that was the rule, and if I didn’t want something bad to happen, I had to wait until it had set.«

Eva Demski has been with her garden for fifty years now. Time to think about what things should be like moving forward. In her New Garden Stories, she talks about challenges she would never have dreamed of. It’s not just climate change and dealing with the fear of a virus that are giving her a hard time, but also her own age and box hedges that have been ripped out. The only thing that...

On April 17, 2021, Elizabeth II had to say goodbye to Prince Philip at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. The Duke of Edinburgh had been her rock for more than seventy years. The morning after the funeral, she flips through her diaries and reviews her eventful life. With the pictures of her grandchildren in front of her, she recalls her own childhood, the preparations for her future role as...

In 1985, Paul Feyerabend gave a lecture at ETH Zurich in which he argued that we can understand many problems of the modern world better if we trace them back to their historical roots in the intellectual world of ancient Greece. His audience, a majority of which had a background in science, was not disappointed. In a deliberately anti-professorial performance peppered with brilliant...

It’s 1945. A dull, heavy fog lies above the city of Donaublau, where a pregnant Berta awaits her fiancé’s return from the front. But instead of Rudolf, his friend Wilhelm enters...

More than fifty years after his death, Theodor W. Adorno has not ceased to arouse great controversy. Many see him as a thinker of uncompromising negativity and gnostic darkness, whose...

»Now they were all mere playthings in the grasping arms of a state order such as had never existed before. An order that could only be destroyed from the outside by lightning and...

A novel about moving out for the last time, about silent family bonds, about regret and forgiveness

As Mira gets into the car to drive from the big city to her small...

Gregor returns home from another continent. The landscape, formerly characterised by its many villages, has become an urban agglomeration, both familiar and foreign at the same time. His family...

Miri is newly single. Together with her best friend Katja, she set out to realise her lifelong dream of opening her own bookshop. They find just the place for it: an old barge in Hamburg harbour. With passion and dedication, the two friends convert the battered barge into a book ship. Miri’s private life is also on the up and up, and she could imagine more than just friendly small talk...

What does the goal of sustainability mean for our democracy? Allegedly, there is a contradiction between the claim to individual freedom on the one hand and the ecological necessity of collective self-restraint on the other. In order to show a way out of this supposed dilemma, Felix Heidenreich draws on the republican tradition of democratic theory in this seminal book. Where liberalism...

Gertrud Kolmar (1894–1943) is considered one of the most important German-language poets of the 20th century, yet to this day many of her works are largely unknown. During her lifetime, only...

The cast of characters who sleep under the sofa in Jakob Borg’s room sure are a motley crew: there is Snout the donkey, who feels called to be a professor and loves nothing more than a good meal....

»We have to bear these images«, said Michael Kretschmer, Minister-President of Saxony, in November 2021 as a response to freezing refugees at the border between Poland and Belarus. His...

Surveys among various occupations have brought to light a frightening phenomenon: violence against officials and public servants. This affect mayors and firefighters, but also bailiffs, staff at job centres and even referees in amateur leagues.

Wilhelm Heitmeyer has researched misanthropy and violence in a number of highly acclaimed studies. He analyses them in the context of the...

»Surrounded by the Flutters of Western and Eastern Lures« ‒ the title of this volume of correspondence refers to the wooing of both West and East German cultural institutions and interest groups that set in after Hesse had been awarded the Nobel Prize as well as other distinctions. Hesse was only too aware that these attempts at appropriation in both West and East were intended to...

Together with his newfound companions, Pig meets even more friends, a crocodile, gnomes, a giant and many more. But Pig still feels very lonely and abandoned. But is that really the case? Of course not!

In catchy rhymes, Jörg Hilbert talks about loneliness. But also about the fact that you are not always alone when you think you are.

History unfolds in time. But how? As progress, in an upward trajectory? Or as a cycle, with similar patterns and temporal rhythms forever reoccurring? In a departure from these long-established...

In 1949, Ludwig Hohl sent out his Report about Artemis. My Situation Created by Artemis Publishers to more than one hundred sympathetic authors, editors, representatives of the literary scene and authorities. In it, he describes a fight that had lasted several years between Hohl and his publisher about the publication of the second volume of his magnum opus The Notes or On...

A nameless author searches for his fortune in the strange metropolis of Paris. He falls into the hands of a shady art dealer named Schwänzel and in with a community of drinkers and vagabonds...

What role does the organisation of working conditions play in securing the existence of a democratic community? Axel Honneth explores this question in his new comprehensive monograph whose...

Throughout the world, democracy is under assault by various populist movements and ideologies. And throughout the world, the same enigma: why is it that political figures or governments, who have...

The abolition of slavery, the introduction of social security systems, and the criminalisation of rape within marriage are commonly regarded as instances of social progress – of change for...

Berlin Things, published in 1975, is Uwe Johnson’s first volume of essays for which he compiled texts written between 1961 and 1971 that had largely been published elsewhere previously. Most of the texts were written on issues of day-to-day politics and they show Johnson as an alert intellectual who intervenes in politics with his journalistic research. Johnson...

I am surrendered to the white, as the white is surrendered to me. Here I am exposed to fear; here, fear is exposed.

This book deals with: unfamiliar meetings, catapults, botched graveyard gardening; with Merve Verlag, Maas Verlag, rubbish; with the man of my age, onions, hope & lotto, SO36; with rubble grey, Poland, Baudrillard, Virilio, Tangerine Dream; with regular get-togethers at the pub, proof for the existence of God, mail, Frieder Butzmann; fresh shirts, Kohlenberta and the speed of light; with...

»War is back.« Alexander Kluge begins his latest book with this first of six stations, prompted by a war of aggression that is initially being waged in a European setting, but...

Saad and his daughter Leila are living under the radar in Berlin. Saad earns his living as a security guard at a car park, working the night shift for good reason. This car park also houses the...

Commemorating those »violently killed« is a core part of political culture. With his groundbreaking work on the »cult of the dead«, Reinhart Koselleck has opened up a new field of research: European memorial landscapes in all their historical, aesthetic and political complexity. Whether they are sacrifices for the fatherland or victims of wars and tyranny,...

Australia and Europe, queerness and Judaism, pop culture and opera stage – in »Curtain, and Hello!«, Barrie Kosky, the celebrated opera director and expert juggler of irreconcilable contradictions, lets us partake in his extraordinary life. Born and raised in Australia, 15,000 kilometres from Europe, the birthplace of opera, he discovered his love for this artform...

In 2013, an era comes to an end in Munich. Michael Krüger, the long-time publisher of Hanser Verlag, retires from his active role in the day-to-day business operations of the publishing house. He didn’t just manage the publishing house and edit the magazine Akzente. He remains active as a poet and write, as a literary critic, editor and translator. He is omnipresent and...

The physician John Dolittle lives in the small town of Puddleby-on-the Marsh, and he is not on good terms with the local people. Things are entirely different with the animals, he is able to help...

Feminism is the most successful social movement in history. This book looks at its diverse past, present and future and sets an important, necessary marker for all those who dedicate themselves to...

»Axel has been missing for three days. I subtract the hours that have passed without him here from the eighty hours that I have known him. Twenty-six hours are left. In little more than a day it’ll be like I never knew Axel Peschke.«

Hamburg, 1977. Julle is fourteen. Shortly before the summer break, a new student, Axel, joins his class. Julle falls...

Franz Kafka not only wrote prose, he was also passionate about drawing: »Did you know I was once a great drawer,« he wrote about his artistic ambitions, half ironic, half proud, to his...

He is considered the great sufferer of modern literature, a brooding existential author. But that is just one side of Franz Kafka; few know that he was struck by legendary fits of laughter, loved slapstick, and integrated many comedic elements in his texts. His friend Max Brod reported how Kafka had laughed so hard while reading the first chapter of The Trial aloud that »he...