Literary Nonfiction

Considering this current moment of great change as well as the 20th century when death became a master from Germany, is literature still possible? Does it still have a reason for being in a post-Auschwitz world where all cultural production can only be an expression of barbarism? Or is literature necessary, indeed indispensible, precisely because of such atrocities? Which methods must such a...

In precise and piercing language, Yannic Biao Federer tells of the loss of his son, of saying goodbye and care work, of parenthood and love. I See You Everywhere, Forever is a document of...

A young girl stands in front of her swimming teacher and begs to finally be put in the advanced group. Yet she can hardly swim at all without help. Her teacher is merciless, the girl descends into despair.

Thirty years later, Heike Geißler is grown up but still despairing – but she's determined to face up to this feeling. What is wrong – with gender roles, heroism, militarisation?...

»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...

On a journey through the south-east of Hungary, the narrator stops off in an almost completely deserted village on the border to Romania. Resignation and a glorification of the past are the most...

»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...

»A book I never wanted to write.«

How does war change pictures? How does it change how we see? How does it change the people who live through it or those who observe it? With her photo...

It begins not with the white of a blank piece of paper but of a block of stone, a 17-tonne monster of solid marble. Months after a fateful encounter with this stone on a ferry off the coast of the...

»There are no gains without corresponding losses, no losses without corresponding gains.« Agnes Heller

»Western man’s inclination to value what is extinct more than what still exists...

Montpellier, 1908: the photograph of a young woman by an easel or »Grandma on the barricades«, as the family calls it. Pre-Revolution portraits, postcards from Venice, Montpellier, or Nizhny...

It is fuelled by life and death in his native Kamering, by the bustle of Italian markets – by the turbulence between the pyres in Varanasi, India. But it can also be fuelled by books, paintings and sculptures, as this collection shows. And sometimes it ignites itself, the zest for language simply starts to burn – when the author sweeps together what needs to be sung of. Then he...

In a world shrunk down to the size of a prison cell, every detail becomes important: the cockroach doing its job, the mousetrap that can be used to kill time, the strange rhythms of the collective...