Politics & Current Affairs

Elon Musk’s much-maligned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, Silicon Valley has seized power in the USA. Meta, Palantir and co. now decide...

A Spiegel bestseller, with 30,000 copies sold

At first glance, progress in artificial intelligence, waves of infection, and the climate crisis may seem to have little to do with each other, but they are often interrelated. And they follow a similar, exponential pattern: one variable – computing power, people infected with COVID19, or CO2 molecules in the atmosphere – increases by a constant factor over a set unit of time. At first, these...

Not far from the East Prussian town of Rastenburg – Kętrzyn in today’s Poland – one of the central locations of the Second World War was hidden deep among the forest: the »Wolf’s Lair«. After...

Everyone in our society wants to be seen and understood, but very few want to see and understand – a glaring imbalance. Everyone claims to be »unique«, but society is not founded on...

There is a great deal of speculation about the relationship between China and Russia. While many observers fear the formation of an authoritarian alliance between these two great powers, the...

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?...

»Political Book« Prize 2025