History & Current Events

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Was nun?

Egon Bahr

What now?

In March 1966, Egon Bahr finished a manuscript. Under the title »What now?«, he outlines a new East German and intra-German policy. Proudly, he hands it to his superior – and the text disappears into a filing cabinet. Willy Brandt feared that in view of the possibility of a grand coalition, the memorandum held too much explosive potential. But the two soon start implementing Bahr’s concept step by step as part of the »Neue Ostpolitik,« the »new eastern policy«: They leave the Hallstein Doctrine, invest in »Change through Rapprochement« and initiate political, social and economic agreements between West Germany and some of the Eastern bloc countries. Brandt’s Warschauer Kniefall, the Warsaw genuflection, is a symbol of this policy to this day. The Chancellor receives the Nobel Peace Prize for it, his most important advisor and closest friends a reputation for being a brilliant analyst of foreign affairs.

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Bruchzone

Wolfgang Bauer

Fracture Zones

It is the year 2018. While in Europe people are still living in a comfort zone, war rages in other regions of the world, state institutions crumble, millions of people are suffering from hunger. The Zeit newspaper journalist, Wolfgang Bauer has been exploring these fracture zones for years. In his new book, he arranges his most penetrating reportage pieces: the North Korean ghost-ships that wash up on the west coast of Japan; the »Maniac«, a serial killer in Russia’s Volga region; or the odyssey of Pakistani sailors fallen into the hands of pirates at the Horn of Africa. However, this book does also contain stories of hope, such as the IT consultant from Minnesota who returns to his Somali homeland to found a state.

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Poland (Czarne)

Die geraubten Mädchen

Wolfgang Bauer

Stolen Girls

In the night from April 14th to April 15th 2014, members of the terrorist organization Boko Haram raided the small town of Chibok in the Northeastern part of Nigeria and abducted 276 young girls from the local boarding school. The event caused massive outrage across the globe. Under the hashtag »Bring Back Our Girls«, politicians, activists and celebrities from all around the world, among them First Lady Michelle Obama and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize Malala Yousafzai, stood up to raise attention and lend their voices to those held captive.

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Über das Meer

Wolfgang Bauer

Across the Sea

There is a humanitarian catastrophe happening in front of our eyes: The Syrian civil war continues to claim hundreds of lives. Millions of Syrians are fleeing, some of them risk the transit from Egypt to Europe by boat. Each year, hundreds of people die during this endeavour, making the Mediterranean the most dangerous sea boarder in the world.

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English world rights (And Other Stories), Spanish world rights (Capitán Swing), Chinese complex rights (Ye-ren), Arabic world rights (Al-Arabi), French world rights (Lux Éditeur), Italy (La Nuova Frontiera), Poland (Czarne), Czech Republic (Grada), Croatia (Sandorf), Turkey (Ayrinti)

Das deutsche Europa

Ulrich Beck

German Europe

In his famous speech in Hamburg in 1953, Thomas Mann warned the Germans never again to strive for a »German Europe«. As a result of the Euro crisis, however, that is exactly what has happened: the continent’s strongest economic power is in a position to dictate the terms under which struggling Euro nations can apply for further credit, to the point where the democratic autonomy of the Greek, Italian, Spanish – and ultimately also the German – parliaments are completely eroded.

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English world rights (Polity), Spanish world rights (Paidos), Chinese simplex rights (Tongji UP), Brazilian Portuguese rights (Paz e Terra), Arabic world rights (Al Kamel), France (Autrement), Italy (Laterza), Norway (Abstrakt), Korea (Dolbegae), Japan (Iwanami), Poland (PWN), Czech Republic (Filosofia), Hungary (Belvedere Meridoniale), Bulgaria (K&X), Serbia (Megatrend University), Greece (Patakis); Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Portugal (Ediçoes 70)

Der Fall Dreyfus

Louis Begley

Why the Dreyfus affair matters

In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attaché in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards – committed to restoring freedom and honor to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another – against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army’s top brass in order to secure Dreyfus’s conviction.

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Brazilian Portuguese (Companhia das Letras)
Das Dritte Reich des Traums

Charlotte Beradt

The Third Reich of Dreams

Charlotte Beradt, who had worked as a journalist in Berlin until, from 1933 onwards, she was no longer employed, fled to England in 1939 and then to New York in 1940. She collected dreams that had occurred between the years of 1933 and 1939 by asking the people surrounding her to retell them: her seamstress, a neighbour, her aunt, the milkman, an entrepreneur friend, a physician… Fifty of those »dreams dictated by dictatorship« were included in The Third Reich of Dreams, her classic work of dream documentation first published in 1966.

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Der Major, der den Krieg überlistete

Daniel-Dylan Böhmer

The Major Who Outflanked The War

The tribal areas on the Pakistani border with Afghanistan are among the most dangerous parts in the world. If there is one thing we don’t usually associate with this remote region, it’s hope. As recently as October 2012, the Taliban carried out an attack on a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl who was advocating education for girls.

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Die Kriegsverbrecherlobby

Felix Bohr

The War Criminals’ Lobby

Immediately after the Second World War, National Socialist war criminals were taken into custody by many Western European countries. Given the Federal Republic of Germany’s links to the West, the majority were released. In Italy and the Netherlands alone, five Germans remained in police custody: SS man Herbert Kappler as the Gestapo commander responsible for the Ardeatine massacre, and the »Breda Four« who had played a significant role in the murder of Dutch Jews. High-ranking German politicians, among them the social democrat German Chancellors Brandt and Schmidt, aided in securing their release.

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Der lange Schatten der Revolution

Michael Brenner

The Long Shadow of the Revolution

After the First World War, Munich became the scene of unusual political constellations: in November 1918, Kurt Eisner became the first ever Jewish prime minister of a German state, while in April 1919, Jewish writers like Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam became involved with the Bavarian Soviet Republic. The Jewish community was rather conservative, and even the Orthodox members liked to visit the Hofbräuhaus after going to the synagogue. But the beginning of the ‘20s already saw a Nazi police president, anti-Jewish tendencies in politics, the press and the church as well as Jewish expulsions and open violence against Jewish citizens on the streets.

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»Nichts ist, wie es scheint«

Michael Butter

»Nothing is as it seems«

According to most recent empirical studies, fifty percent of the US-American population and a smaller, but not insignificant number of Germans believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Personalities like David Icke or Alex Jones enjoy celebrity status; in his TV show the latter chats to Donald Trump, who for his part undermines the belief in shared interpretations with his attacks on the »Fake-News Media«.

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English world rights (Polity Press)

Der Implex

Dietmar Dath, Barbara Kirchner

Pedigree Collapse

Tomorrow, everything is going to be better: Since the Age of Enlightenment, this slogan identifies disciples of social progress, while those of the dark ages bark about how everything was better in the olden days. Some bank on science and technology to enhance freedom, wealth, education, and beauty, others on tradition, blood, land, family, fatherland, and other such ancestral chatter so that it won’t all become even worse than it already is.

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Ach Europa!

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Europe, Europe

»In this highly acclaimed and entertaining book, already »among the touchstones of the new travel writing« (Newsweek), one of [...] Germany’s leading authors takes us on an insider’s tour of Europe in the recent past. Focusing on Italy, Poland, Hungary, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, he describes how Europe has been moving toward a new identity.

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English world rights (Pantheon Books), France (Gallimard), Denmark (Gyldendal), Sweden (Norstedts), Norway (Universitetsforlaget); Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Spanish world rights (Anagrama), Brazilian Portuguese rights (Companhia das Letras), Italy (Garzanti), Netherlands (De Bezige Bij), Japan (Shobunsha), Hungary (Europa), Turkey (Metis)

Aussichten auf den Bürgerkrieg

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Civil Wars

»In Civil Wars, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Germany’s most astute literary and political critic, chronicles the global changes taking place as the result of evolving notions of nationalism, loyalty, and community. Enzensberger sees similar forces at work around the world, from America’s racial uprisings in Los Angeles to the outright carnage in the former Yugoslavia. He argues that previous approaches to class or generational conflict have failed us, and that we are now confronted with an ›autism of violence‹: a tendency toward self-destruction and collective madness.« (book description from the English edition by The New Press)

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Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

The Short Summer of Anarchy

The twelve chapters of the novel deal with the life and death of the Spanish metalworker Buenaventura Durruti, who became the key figure of the Spanish revolution of 1936 after a militant and adventurous youth. The book opens with a prologue entitled »The Funeral Ceremony« and closes with an epilogue on »The Afterworld«. In between the story of a proletarian hero is told, from his childhood in a small city in Northern Spain to Durruti’s ›seven deaths‹ that were never solved.

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Sanftes Monster Brüssel oder Die Entmündigung Europas

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Tender Monster Brussels or the Disenfranchisement of Europe

»Europe is on everyone’s lips these days. Mistrust is rife against the distant institution in Brussels. What, more and more Europeans ask themselves, do our largely unknown custodians do behind mirrored facades, mostly closed doors and with a highly questionable legitimisation?«

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Überlebenskünstler

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Survival Artists

The 20th century was the heyday of writers who had survived state terror and purges with all the ethical and political ambivalences that this entailed. How did they manage to do that? Were they too steadfast to bend to the powers that be? Did they owe their survival to their foresight, their intelligence or sharpness, their belief in themselves, their connections or their tactical skill? Was it serendipitous circumstances bordering on a miracle that helped them escape from prison, camps and death, or was it strategies that spanned from ingratiation to disguise? If only it was possible to make a clear-cut distinction!

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Domestic Rights Sales: German Book Club rights (Büchergilde Gutenberg)

Alexander von Humboldt und die Globalisierung

Ottmar Ette

Alexander von Humboldt and Globalization

In this intellectual biography, one of the most renowned Humboldt researchers, Ottmar Ette, introduces Alexander von Humboldt, who was not only an author and an intellectual, but also a philosopher familiar with the most diverse cultures as well as a natural scientist experimenting with new forms of empirical science.

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Die große Regression

Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Donatella della Porta, Nancy Fraser, Eva Illouz, Ivan Krastev, Bruno Latour, Paul Mason, Pankaj Mishra, Robert Misik, Oliver Nachtwey, César Rendueles, Wolfgang Streeck, David Van Reybrouck, Slavoj Žižek

The Great Regression

At the latest, since the effects of the financial crisis became clear and migration to the European Union began to grow, we have seen developments that many had thought were the phenomena of a distant age: the rise of nationalistic, in part anti-liberal parties like the Front National and the Alternative für Deutschland, the profound crisis of the EU, a coarsening of public discourse thanks to demagogues like Donald Trump, a growing distrust of the established media and the spread of xenophobic ideas... all of which are a reminder of dark times. Politicians are vilified as »traitors to the fatherland«, Muslims are under general suspicion and the internet is awash with the crudest of conspiracy theories.

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Das wunde Leder

Stefan Gmünder, Klaus Zeyringer

Raw Leather

Authoritarian leaders who palm themselves off as men of the people on the podium while corrupt sports officials delight alongside them in their guaranteed immunity; world-cup stadiums that are built by wage-slaves and fall into disrepair after the big event; stars like Neymar who change clubs for astronomic fees – looking at these developments, many fans are of one mind: football is suffering.

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