The Week in Germany: Culture

April 4, 2008

Readings: Second Opinions Courtesy of 'The Week in Germany'

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.

We have added one German-language article to our readings list as a new service - just in case you felt like practicing your German.

Happy Reading!

'The Executor: A Comedy of Letters'
Tim Rutten writes for the Los Angeles Times about German writer Michael Kruger's "The Executor: A Comedy of Letters" (Die Turiner Komödie), which has now appeared in English translation. Rutten praises Kruger's "elegant little novel", hailing it as "a fine and thought-provoking entertainment for anyone who ever has taken their reading seriously or idolized an author - however privately. This is a book that not only lives up to its subtitle but also reminds us that between the dramatic poles of slapstick and black comedy is a broad, gray area where the absurd holds unsettling sway."

John Banville has also reviewed "The Executor" for The New York Review or Books. (click here to read more).

Karl May in 1908 © courtesy of Karl May Museum

Author Karl May's Legacy at Risk
Hundreds of millions of Karl May books have been sold around the world, making him the most widely read German writer ever. Now, the last estate of a German-speaking writer held in private hands could be sold off, Christian Werner reports for Deutsche Welle. (Germany's Eternal Love Affair with the Wild West: The Karl May Festspiele Portray Slice of American Frontier Life in Germany, TWIG, June 29, 2007)

Letters from Marx, Gauguin, Goethe Fetch High Prices at Berlin Auction
As reported recently by Bloomberg.com, letters by Karl Marx, Paul Gauguin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were among the top sellers at an auction of autographs held by Berlin-based dealer J.A. Stargardt.

"Dialectics of Secularization" (in German)
Philosopher Jürgen Habermas, writing for the German-language publication "Blätter fuer deutsche und internationale Politik", contributes to a debate launched by signandsight.com and Perlentaucher on Islam in Europe.

Habermas sides with neither the 'secularists' nor the 'multiculturalists,' but he does approve of the secularists' "insisting energetically on the absolute essentialness of equal inclusion of all citizens in civil society. ... Religious citizens and religious communities should not only assimilate on the surface level. They must embrace the secular legitimation of the community within the premises of their own belief." But Habermas also demands that the secular side engages in a learning process. One of his arguments: "The democratic state (should) avoid rushing to reduce the polyphonic complexity of the spectrum of public voices because it cannot be certain that this might not sever society from the meagre resources that generate meaning and identity.