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The Week in Germany: Culture
August 17, 2007
Readings: TWIG Cannot Cover it All - But We Can Tell You Where
to Find it!
As you might imagine, the TWIG editors spend a lot of time sifting through
the mountain of information available on the Internet about Germany. For
those of you who are not quite as surflustig, we continue our
roving weekly selection of links to top-notch writing about Germany on
the Web. If you like TWIG, you might find these stories interesting as
well.
Happy Reading!
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| Walter Kempowski, Photo: dpa |
 "Richness,
beauty, horror"
Walter Kempowski is a unique figure among German writers. An East German
native, he was interned at Bautzen penitentiary in the early years of
the GDR before leaving to the West. He is known primarily for his large-scale
literary projects "Deutsche Chronik" (German chronicle) - an
autobiographical novel in nine volumes - and "Das Echolot" (echo
sounding), a ten-volume collective diary of World War Two in collage form.
Kempowski is dying of cancer, and the Swiss journalist Peer Teuwsen sat
down with him for a look back at his life and work and a frank discussion
of death.
Still
Small Voice
The Swiss-born writer Robert Walser, who lived in Berlin for some of his
career, wrote about clerking in the early twentieth century much like
one of his contemporaries - Kafka, but with more irony than dread. A translation
of his 1908, novel "The Assistant" gives the New Yorker
occasion to look back on Walser's work and his strange life, which
ended in a decades-long stay in a mental institution.
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Organic
Soda 'Made in Germany' Takes on the World
Last year, TWIG featured a nifty German beverage that sounded, to this
editor at least, like an herbal ambrosia with plenty of trendy eco-cachet
to boot. It is probably also the most attractively packaged beverage outside
of Italian lemonades like San Pellegrino and Orangina. When I finally
got the chance to sample "Bionade" it on a trip to Germany this
winter, I felt a bit sheepish about my enthusiasm. Although I mostly drink
water nowadays, my American palate, probably dulled by the monsoon of
corn-syrupy rocket fuel that washed down my gullet in childhood, failed
to parse the subtle tones of this understated Europan beverage. Now, it
looks like the German treat is out to tame the infamous American sweet-tooth,
as Bionade has grown too large for Germany. Can America learn to love
a beverage that does not have the energy content of Biodiesel? Spiegel
International has the story.
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