NonFiction

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...

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 Afghan Ring Road. A road that exists in reality and is yet a mystery. The 3,200-kilometre circular highway connects the country’s most important cities. It promised unity and prosperity. It has been under construction for sixty years, but it is still not finished. Corruption and mismanagement have swallowed up huge sums of money. After the invasion of Western troops, the road became...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

»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...