Suhrkamp Insel

Uffa Jensen

How the Couch Came to Calcutta

At the end of the 19th century in Vienna, Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis. It developed into a global phenomenon in just a few decades. Concepts like »super-ego«, »narcissism« or »the Oedipus complex« have long been a part of our everyday speech. In order to understand this dynamic development, Uffa Jensen considers three cities which, in addition to Vienna, were of great importance for the development of the psychoanalytic movement: Berlin, London and Calcutta.

Dževad Karahasan

A House for the Wearied

Sarajevo, September 1914. In a newspaper editorial office, at the national bank and in other official locations, letters arrive with considerable delay, often years later. Yet it is not the war that has thrown the imperial and royal mail into confusion, but rather a postman in love who has fallen on the battlefield of the world war just unfolding.

Sarah Kirsch, Christa Wolf

»We truly got used to all sorts of things«

»Dearest, dearest Christa, how nice that you remain here on this daft planet!«, Sarah Kirsch writes in the autumn of 1988 to her friend who has just recovered from a life-threatening illness. One decade earlier, following a meeting in West Berlin just after Kirsch had left the GDR, Christa Wolf stated: »I am glad that I was with you and can now think of you calmly.«

Bledar Kola, Ursula Heinzelmann

New Albanian Cuisine

From cooking at Noma to revolutionising the Albanian cuisine: The traditional cuisine of Albania, shaped by the country’s Ottoman past as well as by Italy and Greece, yet still distinct and authentic, reinterpreted here in 70 recipes by Bledar Kola and the team at his restaurant Mullixhiu.

Merle Kröger

The Experts

The 1960s have started and with them the Age of Aquarius. Adolf Eichmann is sentenced to death in Tel Aviv. Konrad Adenauer agrees on military aid for Israel. At the same time, however, German aeronautical engineers, engine builders and rocket scientists are drawn to Egypt in great numbers.

Tatjana Kruse

Some Like it Dead

Konny and Kriemhild see the most powerful man of their village kill a woman. Realising he’s been made, he intends to get rid of Kriemhild. But Kriemhild survives and decides to fake her own death so she can catch the murderer on her own. For without a body, the police are hesitant to investigate such a prominent citizen.

Benjamín Labatut

Un Verdor Terrible

In his literary exploration Un Verdor Terrible, Benjamín Labatut writes about the fine line between genius and insanity and about the ambivalence of scientific discoveries in four chapters that are as sensuous as they are bizarre. The text portrays the life of scientists Fritz Haber, Werner Heisenberg, Alexander Grothendieck and Erwin Schrödinger as that of daredevil dreamers and passionate trailblazers. We read of their Eureka!-moments, their triumphant epiphanies, but also of their ethical shortcomings, their mental lows and their narcissism.

Maya Lasker-Wallfisch

Letter to Breslau

Maya grows up in silence. The German past, the Holocaust that her mother survived as a cellist in the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz – nobody talks about these things. And yet, Maya cannot escape the wounds of her parents, a stable life impossible she drifts through 1970s London. The nights too long, drugs, debts, the wrong guys, an escape to Jamaica where she almost dies … In order to survive, she suddenly realizes that she needs to overcome the silence. She starts to write: letters to her grandparents who were murdered by the Nazis, a direct way of setting up a dialogue with her past. Piece by piece her words bring the family together and help her understand that her own future lies in returning to Germany.

Philipp Lenhard

Friedrich Pollock

Philipp Lenhard’s book is the first biography on Friedrich Pollock (1894 – 1970). It talks about the life of a man who played a defining role in German-Jewish intellectual history but always kept to the background.

Sibylle Lewitscharoff

From Above

Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s narrator is looking down onto his own grave, the bereaved friends and neighbours, onto the strange and the familiar in the city that is moaning under the oppressive heat from a bird’s-eye perspective. With no body and no will of his own he drifts through the sky above Berlin, appears here and there, a silent messenger, witness to beautiful and horrible things, with supernatural hearing and vision, but condemned to the complete inability to act. His memories are sketchy, his future uncertain. What can he hope, what does he have to fear: Hell? Purgatory? Heavenly paradise?

Janina Loh

Robot Ethics

In her essential book, philosopher Janina Loh addresses the moral challenges that play a role in the construction of robots as well as in dealing with them: Are robots autonomous? Can they act morally? Do they have a moral value? Should they have rights? Who is responsible when a robot harms a human being?

Andreas Maier

The Family

At the end of this novel, narrator Andreas is 28 years old, living in in Frankfurt am Main, studying, among other things, theories of truth. Andreas Maier tells the story of how stumbling blocks in his own personal life made it possible for his protagonists to become involved in such esoteric studies. In his characteristically ironic-comical and at the same time emotional style he tries to discover what inevitably brought them to concerning themselves with the difference between »truth« and »falsehoods«, or rather, »lies«.

Steffen Mau

Lütten Klein

Steffen Mau grows up in the 1970s in Lütten Klein, a neighbourhood of newly constructed residential buildings in Rostock. When the Berlin Wall falls, he is serving with the National People’s Army, after the reunification he goes to university, eventually becomes a professor. All the while his home is battling with the drawbacks of the reunification: Instead of a prospering economy, rusty industrial ruins dominate the landscape. With new freedom and mass consumerism come the experiences of social downgrading.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Michalsen

Healing Through Nutrition

Andreas Michalsen dedicates his new book to his biggest concern: making us healthier. In his very personal, knowledgeable and convincing style, he guides the reader towards a balanced and improved diet that can prevent illnesses or be directed at healing them. The book contains detailed schedules for regular fasting that are easily implemented into one’s daily routine. The author shows that the right diet not only provides the body with stimuli to activate regeneration and self-healing. It’s nothing less than the key to a longer life.

Robert Misik

The False Friends of the Common People

Old parties are disappearing, new ones are emerging. The guiding principles of discourse are changing. As chaotic as the political situation presents itself, as confusing is the range of interpretations of the rise of authoritarian nationalism: Some explain it with political apathy and amorphous anger, other with economical factors such as globalisation and growing inequality, others still ascribe it to the supposed cultural depreciation of people with traditional values and lifestyles.

Thomas Montasser

A Heavenly Catastrophe

An old monastery in a magical and forgotten corner of Burgundy. Three elderly nuns barely managing to keep the place going. And a young woman, Louise, from the banlieues of Paris, with a talent for getting into trouble.

Hanns-Josef Ortheil

How I Learnt to Play the Piano

The first time he has a piano lesson, Hanns-Josef Ortheil is four years old. Guided by his mother, he makes rapid progress and is placed in the care of a Russian pianist. Soon he makes the decision to become a concert pianist and to shine on the important stages of the world. For the young piano student this means years of practice, often many hours a day. Shortly after graduating from grammar school, the twenty-year-old receives a scholarship to study in Rome, where he experiences a completely unexpected breakdown. His big dream is shattered...

Dirk Peitz

Looking Ahead: How We Are Narrating the Future

We can’t foresee the future. If you believe that you’re already living it, as some people in the Silicon Valley do, you need to adjust yourself because the future global power China is preparing to take over interpretational sovereignty. What, then, can we say about what is to come? Do we have reason to rejoice? Do we need to be scared?

Andreas Pflüger

Blindsided

Blind Special Agent Jenny Aaron pins all her hopes on a therapy that is meant to give her back her eyesight. But the men who died for her last winter won’t let go of her.

Lutz Raphael

Beyond Coal and Steel

In the 1970s many western European states were gripped by unprecedented structural transformation: the factories of the old industries disappeared, millions of jobs were lost, previously booming cities were beset by crises, and new social questions determined the political agenda. But what happened to the proud industrial citizen – to his jobs, career path, and residential districts? How did the social rights and political participation of workers change when competition went global, management was streamlined, and financial capitalism became dominant? Which ideas and ideologies accompanied the change?