History & Current Events

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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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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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English world rights (The Aquarius Press/Quadrangle Books – published, rights reverted), Brazilian Portuguese rights (Trés Estrelas), France (Payot & Rivages – published, rights reverted), Italy (Einaudi), Sweden (Ersatz), Croatia (Disput), Greece (Agra)

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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»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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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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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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France (Alma)

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 Zizek

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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Die Jahre im Zoo

Durs Grünbein

The Years at the Zoo

In this book full of stories, verse, and rare photographs, the poet Durs Grünbein presents himself in an autobiographical light. And yet he reaches further back to a time when the early contours of the twentieth century were just beginning to emerge.

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Sweden (Ersatz)

Zur Verfassung Europas

Jürgen Habermas

On Europe's Constitution

»In the face of a politically unregulated rise in global social complexity which systemically and increasingly restricts the autonomy of the nation state, the normative function of democracy itself requires that political agency be expanded beyond national boundaries.« Jürgen Habermas

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Der Hauslehrer

Michael Hagner

Private Tutor

October 1903. Bayreuth is the scene of a sensational trial. Andreas Dippold, a 23-year-old law student and private tutor to two brothers, is accused of beating his pupils so violently that one of them died of his injuries. Dippold insists that he was right to discipline his charges, to correct their wicked habit of masturbation.

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Spanish world rights (Mardulce)

Minsk

Artur Klinau

Minsk

Anyone arriving in Minsk for the first time is likely to be confused and overwhelmed by the enormous boulevards, the endless parks downtown, and the numerous places adorned with curious décor.

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Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945

Alexander Kluge

The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945

Alexander Kluge’s account The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945 first appeared in 1977. Exactly twenty years later, it became one of the most important points of reference in that discussion which freed the air war on German cities and the civilian population from being anathema. Such a literary depiction of the air raids and their effects were not entirely without precedent, but Kluge was the first to give a cool, analytical presentation of the work of destruction and from the bowels of the inferno probe that remainder of autonomy and rationality which allowed the connections of the catastrophe as well as potential ways out to appear.

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Anti-Europäer

Claus Leggewie

Anti-Europeans

The Greek crisis and the lack of willingness to act when dealing with refugees have shown clearly that the European Union is troubled. Additionally, there are more and more voices of various degrees of provenance that attack Europe and question European values: identitarians like the mass murderer Anders Breivik, jihadists like the Syrian Abu Musab al-Suri, »Eurasians« like Putin-advisor Alexander Dugin, but also some left-wing populists associated with Syriza and Podemos.

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Die Ordnung der Welt

Ulrich Menzel

The Order of the World

The order of the world is one of the major problems that nations find themselves confronted with. Who creates order in the anarchy of the international system if the relationships between nations become increasingly dense and the need for an international order is growing as a consequence of globalization?

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Jugend – Pop – Kultur

Bodo Mrozek

Youth – Pop – Culture

Clamorous sounds, unruly behavior, and colorful fashions: the sonic vocabulary used by contemporaries to describe the new youth scene in the mid-20th century mark a cultural dividing point. Aesthetic conflicts culminated in street riots and produced police measures, censorship, and laws. Spectacular court cases against youths led to negative social clichés of male urban youth: the American juvenile delinquent, the British teddy boy, the French blouson noir and the German halbstarke.

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