“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.”
«Ich schaffe gerade Ordnung bei den Pflanzen, sie sollen sich nicht in die Quere kommen, nichts Abgestorbenes, keine Ameise soll stören. Sie sind vernünftig und passen sich ihren Behältern an; sind diese klein, bleiben sie kleinwüchsig, wenn sie Platz bekommen, legen sie zu. Anders die Menschen.»
“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.”
Schlüpfrige Lyrik und abgegriffene DVDs, Gebrauchsdinge und Gimmicks, Kampfpuppen und Kartoffelsalat. Egal was Amazon Kevin Killian nach Hause schickte, seine Reviews verwandelten es in große Literatur. Zwei Snapshots seiner genialen Rezensionskunst, aus dem Englischen von Clemens J. Setz.
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.
If we want to find peace with ourselves and others, we must repeat and work through the wounds of the past—at least that’s what psychoanalysis tells us. The essays and photography published in our Reader 4 confront these methods with the harsh realities of the present.
In Germany, “reason of state” has enshrined the propagandist claim that Palestinians have no land or nation. Yet a survey of academic discourse and the cultural scene reveals the opposite: it is we who lack a language for Palestine, its diaspora, and our entangled histories. This needs to change.
In The Shamaya Palace, Ali Al-Kurdi narrates the decades-long transformation of a refugee shelter in Syria since the 1950s. In several key passages, the German translation tones down the novel’s political edge. — Part 2 of Maha El Hissy’s four-part essay on Palestinian literature in Germany.
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.