NonFiction

»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...

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...

Whether he talks about the suffering of professional footballers or about a strange journey on a train through Egypt, whether he chats about life in New York or an old postman who delivered his...

Talking about the weather, about anything, that is. Being understood, even if it’s just by someone who doesn’t even speak my language. Peter Bichsel’s columns can strike up a conversation with...

The first of Peter Bichsel‘s P.S.-columns, which have become an institution sui generis over the course of four decades, was published in Zurich’s Tages-Anzeiger in 1975. But even in the 1960s, the author had been writing numerous journalistic contributions and columns on questions of the times, that accompanied his early successes as a literary storyteller. Beat...

»I suffer from orthorexia nervosa. It is a concept I only became familiar with recently and it describes an obsession with eating healthily. That sounds good, you might say? But it is not. I slavishly follow each new health edict. By turning my back on everyday foods, I have started to feel as if I am slowly killing myself. Incidentally, I am only one of millions affected in Germany. At...

We are living in a state of continuously growing wealth and have been enjoying more than 70 years of democracy and peace. But instead of satisfaction, many experience a feeling of unease. The demands for performance in our workplace take over our leisure time, complaints about insomnia and depression can be heard in all parts of society. How did that happen? Gernot and Rebecca Böhme examine...

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...

Relocating the Secret Point gathers underground texts and speeches. The collection opens with a satire of expatriation written in January 1977 and is followed by the radical pamphlet Büchner’s Letters; it contains essays on Shakespeare and Rimbaud, Goethe and Kafka: poetry and politics, and points to a shift in the work that will grow into a radical change.

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...

»Dear Sonja,« David writes in these enlightening and desperate letters to a revered classmate from days long gone, »looking back isn’t always the best idea: Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s...

»I only produce shit nowadays,« reads a diary entry by Arno Schmidt, meaning: journalistic texts for newspapers. Since 1990, Dietmar Dath has published heaps of – well: journalistic, satirical, and essayistic texts and by doing so has created his very own fan base.

Like very few others, he manages to connect Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Bourdieu, pop culture to...

This book deals with approaching being Jewish after the normality of origin, family, tradition and faith has been lost with the people killed in the genocide. How does one live a Jewish life in which one can no longer hum the melodies for the holidays? Some of the essays address the connections of Jewish issues with the moral system of human rights: How should we evaluate the treatment of the...