“Smoking might be banned at book fairs, while one doesn’t expect books to be banned from book fairs. Even if a character in one of the books exhibited at a fair is smoking, this wouldn’t lead to a ban on characters smoking in books. The simple, obvious reason is: literature does not equal reality.”

As Trump drags global trade and the dollar sinks to a four-year low, one bipartisan obsession endures: dollar dominance, the world’s reserve-currency privilege. Kenneth Rogoff’s Our Dollar, Your Problem could have traced its genealogy and risks, but instead serves up tired Boomer platitudes.

To keep us in the loop, the mental health industry, especially online, has hand-sized solutions for loss—even when it is as unbearable as losing a child. Against this tide of griefluencing, Yiyun Li’s memoir on the deaths of her sons insists on the permanence of sorrow—and a language of mutual care.

The main argument against a boycott of Israeli universities is that it harms the wrong people, hitting civil society and weakening opposition to Netanyahu. But this rests on false assumptions, philosophically and practically. Protests and acts of “speaking up” can be complicit in criminal politics.

“It’s important to be honest with yourself, my shrink says at the end of one of our sessions—even if you don’t want to tell me everything. I make a weak joke—I’m Asian, I was brought up being judged. She doesn’t laugh, merely offers a tight smile before writing some notes.”

“For years I knew him only as the biographer of Jack Spicer, the enigmatic poet who penned the unforgettable sentence: ’if it were spelled mune it would not cause madness.’ But Kevin Killian was much more, an experimental writer, a playwright – and the most important Amazon reviewer of all time.”

It was a tragic turning point in the history of decolonization: the CIA-backed ousting and assassination of Congo’s president Patrice Lumumba. In the era’s visual and sound archives, Johan Grimonprez has tried to find a soundtrack to this fateful coup d’état, but fails to grasp its complex rhythms.

Neither Trump’s nor Putin’s pet came out as president from the elections, but there is little doubt that one day Romania will follow its neighbors into the lure of mobster governance. Until then, investors, ideologues, and influencers are prepping up for one more round of selling out their country.

The Brazilian artist’s first retrospective in Germany invites visitors—or participants—to play with her famous 1960s Bichos. Enshrined in the Internationalist glass museum, Clark’s revolutionary gesture risks losing its local specificity to become all aesthetics and no political action.

When Antonio Scurati’s voluminous Mussolini novel first appeared, Trump had just taken office and the “crisis of democracy” was on everyone’s lips. Things have only gotten darker since—yet today’s Scurati imitators treat fascism as little more than a backdrop for romance or coming-of-age.

The Destruction of Gaza has eerie echoes in Jewish history. As books by Göran Rosenberg, Peter Beinart and Michael Sfard confront the catastrophic aftermath of October 7, Jewish thought and Jewish tradition in both Israel and in the diaspora could hardly be more opposed to the Israeli government.

Forty years ago, Federal President Weizsäcker claimed that the Germans, too, had been liberated from National Socialism on May 8, 1945. The memory culture inaugurated by this speech can no longer face up to reality. A rebuttal in honor of all “displaced persons” and those who still await liberation.

Much of Trump’s crude tariff policy stems from economist Stephen Miran, whose User’s Guide to global trade wants to structurally devalue the US dollar. But his hands are tied: shadow banks provide much of the world’s USD supply, and squeezing them too hard would crash the financial economy.

With millions in sales, royalties from big-time TV, and widely read op-eds on the Basque question, Fernando Aramburu is a star in the Spanish literary scene. While his best-selling novels show a lack of empathy for his political opponents, in El Niño, he returns to what he does best: storytelling.

Few, in Germany, have done more to enhance the anti-antisemitic cancel culture than Volker Beck. The Green Party politician and veteran gay rights campaigner knows how to wield power and is immune to scandal – his scope and determination do not bode well for free speech, including for Jewish people.

Largely unnoticed by the West, torn apart by religious, ethnic, and economic conflicts, Sudan has for years been one of the deadliest regions in the world. The systematic violence against women in its wars has roots in the trans-saharan slave trade — and in our author’s own family history.

Faster than expected, the fertility rate of humankind may have fallen below the so-called replacement rate. The most alarmist responses are raised by pro-natalist white men on the right, but research suggests that their very own technological agenda is driving the decline more than any other factor.

Despite being a reliable source of harm and harassment, the nuclear family has not yet seen its own MeToo moment. Are families everywhere, even in Norway, doomed to endless Repetition, as Vigdis Hjorth’s new novel suggests?

“If friendship yields, the fight will yield as well. Should we not infer then that the two men we see fighting in Sarraute’s Pour un oui et pour un non remain friends, and stubbornly so? No one is better positioned to prove this than us, the audience, the excluded third party.”

When the Berlin mayor cancels UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese and Scholz and Merz openly oppose the proceedings of international courts regarding Israel, it becomes clear: German staatsräson is no longer driven by concern about antisemitism, but by fear of international law.

Few countries speak of the “international rules-based order” as lyrically as Germany—yet deals with problematic governments in China, Saudi-Arabia and Russia have long been routine. Were the arms deliveries to Israel throughout the erasure of Gaza a glaring double standard, or business as usual?

Judith Butler has become for many—borrowing her own words on Hannah Arendt—the «most avid secular Jewish critic of Zionism» in the 21st century. An engagement with their actual writing on Palestine reveals a subtle, non-violent position that presents a challenge to both Israelis and Palestinians.

«Which comes first – writing or translation? The answer seems obvious; you can’t translate something that’s not yet written – although I have often wished this were possible. My translators and I have joked about this, with me telling them: ‹you go ahead and translate, I’ll write it afterwards.›»

What the Eiffel Tower is to Paris and Linzer Torte to Linz, Sally Rooney and Rachel Cusk are to the novel—to meet the standard they have set themselves, they must exceed it. As their newest books have missed that mark, should we read them as rebellions against normality? Or did they simply fail?

In the 80s and 90s, debates raged on how to represent atrocities like the Holocaust. Today, the internet is flooded with numbing images. Lee Yaron and Amir Tibon’s books on October 7 break through this noise with personal testimony and investigative research, revealing Israel’s torn soul.

«We ought to take Trump seriously, not literally», someone wisely cautioned. This applies to the entire American hard-right, whose ideological antics might soon become policy. From «White Genocide» to «The Punisher» and «The Sigma Male», the talking points of an internet subculture are about to win.

Over the last 50 years, seeking dead women has become a strangely popular topic of novels, biographies, and autofiction—with authors often as female, white and floundering as their objects of desire. But besides the mix of undiscovered talent and morbid glamor, what are they really looking for?

In 1972, Paul Celan wrote to Yehuda Amichai that he couldn’t imagine a world without Israel—a notion that continues to shape the Middle East conflict to this day. Shortly after the Israeli beeper attack in September, a group of scholars gathered in Tel Aviv to discuss Celan’s statement.

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine offers a critical historical account of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Challenging its widely accepted interpretation as a clash between two irreconcilable narratives, it has been received in Germany with suspicion.

The Delors Report laid the groundwork in 1985 for the «Maastricht Europe,» which included the EU internal market and monetary union. Mario Draghi’s 2024 report now advocates for a paradigm shift from competitiveness to productivity. The EU has no alternative but to embrace this directive.

Most current research on antisemitism in Germany is based on the concept of «eliminatory antisemitism» as practiced by the Nazis. It fails to comprehend a complex social reality where large parts of the population have family ties to the Middle East, not Nazi Germany.

Working for a German software company in the West Bank requires the exact same skills as getting through the Qalandiya check-point: the patience of Job and knowing when you cross a line.

In his iconic MoMA water lily paintings, Monet’s brushwork is the magnified version of his usual smaller strokes. But to summarize what might connect a late Monet and Rilke’s French poetry with … well … Soviet fighter jets, you’d need to write another essay. So why not just read this one?

As dining out has turned into an extreme sport—with chefs as idolized celebrities and customers as eager to perform—food lovers with a sense for sustainability keep asking one question: Is there a way ahead for culinary excellence that does not equate good food with bad labour practices?

Faroquhi, Putz, Mercedes… Like the poststructuralists who were his contemporaries, Harun Farocki played with faces and facets of a fracturing self. But instead of polishing his reputation, he used his «foreign» name and outsider position as sources for a gradually evolving craft of self-alienation.

«The Israel I recall sees itself as secular, liberal and democratic … It’s the Israel that failed, that is over. For this Israel, Jerusalem was the past, Tel Aviv the present and the future – this was Haifa.»

Recent novels by Jennifer Croft and Kate Briggs amp up the role of the literary translator precisely in a the moment when the machines take over. Is this a last hurrah of a heroic yet notoriously invisible profession – or does it betray an ignorance of what translators are actually doing?

«On Holy Saturday, the sun closes early, leaving a phantom of warmth for tourists and visitors. The gray light, on this doorway of a day, between death and living again, turns us into some species of ghost, wandering in pairs or groups of beloveds through the Sanssouci Park in Potsdam.»

«I dreaded encountering what I already knew: that I was more likely than white women or non-Black women of color to deliver a child prematurely, more likely to die from childbirth, and more likely to have my pain ignored by the medical professionals tasked with keeping me safe.»

When Gaza student protestors were evicted from Berlin universities, the few scholars who stood up for them were smeared by the right-wing press and threatened with public funding cuts. Can universities be a place for radical politics? Adorno and Marcuse fell out over this question as early as 1969.

German-Israeli reconciliation started as early as the 1950s under Adenauer and Ben-Gurion. They acted out of calculation, and not forgiveness or remorse. Germany’s reason of state today is based on a simple trade off: absolution for Germany; support and reconstruction aid for Israel.

Berlin as a city of émigrés and expats is one of the many clichés local politicians like to invoke when it suits their agenda. But recent months have shown that some feelings of estrangement from the local culture cannot be undone – the exile’s perception of time and place remains a different one.

Jan Assmann, the late scholar of memory studies and a masterful narrator, claimed that antisemitism originated in response to monotheistic violence. Though his argument was itself critiqued as antisemitic, it was not. Rather, Assmann saw Judaism as the core challenge of Western civilisation.

Before 7 October, the military strategists Edward Luttwak and Eitan Shamir published a sugarcoated account of the Israel Defence Forces’ «innovative» practice and spirit. They gloss over what the IDF actually does, and how various doctrinal elements play out in the near total destruction of Gaza.

The novel has been pillaged for a long while now. After a decade of memoirs and essays, it seemed that literary imagination had died at the hands of autofiction. With recent books by Hernan Diaz, Benjamin Labatut and Catherine Lacey, the novel strikes back – and starts stealing from nonfiction.

In Goodbye Julia, the first film from Sudan to run at Cannes, Mohamed Kordofani portrays the racist hierarchy from North to South as gripping drama of domestic life. The mundane set-up encapsulates a whole society’s political fate and reveals the skill of a filmmaker who never went to film school.

Germany takes pride in its memory culture. But its often self-congratulatory remembrance rituals have many blind spots. One of them is the network of international solidarity that the GDR was part of. Echos of the Brother Countries, an exhibition at HKW Berlin, allows for a closer look.

The Dutch and other «small» book markets are in trouble because either people do not read at all, or they read in English. Who is going to withstand the forces of Americanization? A relentless, cheeky poetic scene in the Low Countries might not have the answer, but it asks the right questions.

Kids these days flock to raves as if they were the latest incarnation of transcendence, but what about the political economy that squeezes profit out of every last pocket of subculture? McKenzie Wark and Hannah Baer on raving during a pandemic, late in life, and its ambivalent politics.

The war in Gaza has produced numbing levels of violence and massive Palestinian casualties. A profoundly unequal assessment of the worth of lives, built over decades of oppression, provides the genealogy of the extreme violence unfolding in Israel and Palestine since 7 October 2023.

On April 29, 1987, for the 20th anniversary of the Six-Day War, David Grossman, then a young 33-year-old author, published one of the most important works to have ever appeared in Israel on the Palestinian question: The Yellow Time. Six months later, the First Intifada broke out.

Letters are not quite a thing of the past; as a literary device they’re perfectly alive to open some doors and keep others shut. In current works by Adam Thirlwell, Ridley Scott and Maïwenn, letters trigger different yet eerily similar gendered fantasies about who is entrusted to write them and why.