Essays

The rotating elements on kitchen hobs that allow you to conveniently regulate the temperature are called »knobs«. Of course, anyone who buys an induction hob nowadays will find themselves fumbling...

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?...

»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...

In November 2021, Daria Serenko published her debut work Girls and Institutions (Девочки и институции, No Kidding Press 2021), which caused a great stir and in which Serenko in a...

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...

From time immemorial, man has had to organise his »metabolism with nature«. For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labour. When Prometheus, according to the myth,...

Be it in her award-winning novels, reportages or essays – Nora Bossong’s texts unfailingly take us straight into the painfully relevant problems areas of our time. Where others make snap judgements or withdraw into themselves, she looks closely, listens with compassion and asks questions: about colonial guilt and global justice, about the West’s claims to power and...