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Option A trip to Sicily that takes place in the head of a woman when she finds herself in scenes in Viscontis again and again The Leopard loses, the scenes make her feel like she has been to Palermo a thousand times. A looming love story, as mysterious as Antonionis Blow Up. Stories of big cinema and small life are in this new edition of the literary magazine At the bay window told (Daedalus, 155 S.)
Joachim Feldmann founded it in 1977 with a friend, it was a late product of the alternative literature scene of the seventies. In the 80s the core editorial team even lived together in a flat share in Münster and offered the paper at night for a mark in student bars. In return you got agit-prop poetry, spontaneous texts or neosensitive poems: culture was political. In 1979 FJ Strauss was even on the cover. Twice a year the magazine is devoted to one topic (➝ Kraft). The edition is small but consistent. Maxi linen purchase
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Biedermeier Clever move by Georg Seeßlen, We petty bourgeois 4.0 (Tiamat, 282 pp.) While the skewered, but digitally savvy Greens strive for government. Together with Markus Metz, he asks in which direction the petty bourgeoisie will develop. It always leaves a “social slag” behind, which is simply “left behind” by the rapid development: not all petty bourgeoisie are eco-hipsters or turbo-capitalists. In the past, those who were left behind could still escape into conservatism, but in the neoliberal era this also switched to speed and flexibility. Seeßlen sees this as a nucleus of fascism: “The petty bourgeoisie is losing the social balance that politics only promises to give him back, a politics that promises his dictatorship.” Does the traffic light know how to prevent this? Dorian Baganz
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exorcism Whether the love for Jean-Jacques Schuhl, the writer (who won the prestigious Prix Goncourt for the biography of Ingrid Caven’s life), helped to exorcise the egocentric Fassbinder, Caven’s ex-husband? ”Asks Ute Cohen the last German Diva Caven. It has often been compared to the Dietrich, but is actually an “own eclectic creation”, in the tradition of Lotte Lenya, with a “strong dose of camp aesthetics” like that taz wrote on her 70th birthday in 2018. In Germany, the daughter of a Saarbrücken tobacco dealer became known through films with Fassbinder. Caven has lived in Paris since the late 1970s, where she enjoyed success as a chansonnière. Cohen and Caven met here and in Berlin, talked about the wild seventies (➝ Alternative), Hölderin, Kokain, Brecht. One recognized oneself in wit and in self-discipline, Cohen describes the conversations. Chaos? Listen, sing (Kampa, 176 p.) Is an extraordinary portrait of an extraordinary artist. And how was that with Fassbinder? “I didn’t have to exorcise Rainer, he had to exorcise me!” Katharina Schmitz
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Information Despite the title Capital is dead (Merve, 247 pp.) Author McKenzie Wark does not claim that there is no more capitalism, only that a new mode of production is already developing from it. The new ruling class of “vectorists” appropriates information, controls it, extracts “a kind of added information value” from workers and consumers and uses it to develop profitable forecast models. “Every movement you make with your cell phone is recorded by a vector and fed into a calculation process,” hence the name of the new class. Our author Tom Wohlfarth translated the stimulating book. Michael Hunter
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Kraft If she’s just not that Friday Our picture editor Ann-Kristin Ziegler cheats us at times when she is equipped with pictures. It then lets off steam in other publications, such as recently in the current issue of Epilogue (No. 10, 2021, 130 pp.). In the magazine for contemporary culture, everything revolves around one topic. This time: power. The editorial team looks at the forces of our time: on mountains of muscles and under masks, on the raw and clumsy. It dares to look beneath the surface of culture, things, even the earth’s crust. And it proves in text and images why print magazines still have a right to exist. Christian Bobsien
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Mafia For two years, the ethnologist and literary scholar Ulrich van Loyen, born in Dresden in 1978, conducted field research in Naples’ local lower class. Hardly anyone has not been to prison here, everyone has come into contact with the Camorra.
Will the mafia, this “honorable society” that has grown out of tradition, never die out, asks Loyen, because myths are mainly circulating about its origins? And because she dresses herself in these myths, in which she stages her genealogy, her rites of violence and her family culturally, to then put it into practice and “to enter the area cleared by fiction”? And, asks Loyen further, are we consumers complicit? In his fascinating book The godfather and his shadow (Matthes & Seitz, 198 pp.) The author explores the real beginnings of this “great story” so that we can better understand it. Katharina Schmitz
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Punk “Culture monsters just love: / songs about sex, beer and violence!” – the best way to read Tijan Silas Noise (KiWi, 272 p.) With The Pig Must Die as an accompanying soundtrack. Because the novel, like their punk rock songs, is primarily about that triad. Of course, the story is a little more difficult. But at that level it remains rather conventional, as we know it from coming-of-age stories. Type in the province – here in the Palatinate in the 90s – is looking for his identity, finds it in a punk band. Of course there is an unhappy love and because his parents are from Bosnia, homeland and origin are also issues. We know that now. What makes the novel so fascinating is the lack of restraint (➝ exorcism). We are in the so-called baseball bat years, and Nazis get pissed off there too, academic differentiators are laughed at. Sila’s language is uncompromising and has a driving beat. Yeah, that’s punk. Tobias Prüwer
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Question of meaning Why has friendship become worthless in postmodern society, why do we lose it? Because it may not fit into the new world, the new partner, the newly formed self-image. Jan C. Behmann thinks in his text miniatures, gathered in Stop prose (edition: behmann, 223 p.), among other things on “Normenschen”, those who adapt but lose their inner beach. Corona has robbed many of their narcotics – it’s quiet outside, but it’s noisy inside. “Do nothing. How did that work again? ” Consumption (➝ information) or being? Old questions, reading stimulates new thinking. One cannot lengthen life, only condense it, said Roger Willemsen. Well done. Maxi linen purchase
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Temperature rise If you wanted to say goodbye to the Moselle apollo butterfly, now is the time. Or the broken anemone. Why? Because both of these will soon no longer exist in Germany, climate change and such. The disappearance of the two is just one of dozens and dozen global warming effects that Nick Reimer and Toralf Staud have compiled. Germany 2050. How climate change will change our country (KiWi, 388 p.) Reads all the more oppressive, the more sober and factual the authors paint a picture of our near future (➝ Biedermeier): how water scarcity, extreme weather, forest and species extinction and so on will change our lives. On a large as well as small scale. Pepe Egger
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Inactive Agatha Frischmuth and doing nothing: There are more obvious liaisons. No matter how complex the topic, no matter how daring the deadline, for us it rushes to work on a lead essay in the middle of a conference. In Agatha Frischmuth’s book, which is based on her dissertation, it is consequently not about switching off and relaxing, but about “doing nothing as political practice” (Transcript, 328. S.) and its literary reflections in the modern age. Based on Robert Walsers The assistant, Thomas Manns Zauberberg, A man sleeping by George Perec and Miroslav Nahaczs Bombela she actively feels the (calm) pulse for a whole century. Christine Käppeler
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reconstruction It is miserable when you compare the difficulties that Berlin is facing as a result of the pandemic with those that the city had to cope with after the collapse in May 1945, writes Erhard Schütz in the afterword to this anthology. Surreal worlds it is called and has been published by Siebenhaar-Verlag. The title associates the “surrealist landscapes” that Margaret Bovari perceived at the time. She shows herself here as a wide-awake chronicler of the big city, which with laconicity did not conceal even the taboo: “The usual rapes – a neighbor who refused was shot.” Bovari is by no means the only author to be discovered in this volume. Have you heard of Ingrid Wendt? Not me. In 1945 she was the editor of a women’s magazine in East Berlin, then for the radio. In her novel, which was only published in 1956 Emergency victim Berlin Döblin’s montage and the pace of the Weimar Republic live on, now mirrored in the fate of women. Michael Angele
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confidence If I had to recommend one article by Michael Hametner, I would insist on two, because he writes for him Friday about both art and literature. His interview with the author Thomas Kunst and his portrait of the collector Günter Lichtenstein, who shortly after the fall of the Wall, began to buy works that had been created during the GDR era, should therefore be emphasized. “When nobody wanted them”, as Hametner wrote, which brings us right in the middle of it in his book “German Menopause” (Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 222 pp.), which takes a scrutinizing look at how literature and art from the East were dealt with after 1989 and asks about the state of reunification in both fields. Much bitter is what he describes: For him it is primarily about showing how things could go differently, how things will go differently, one day when he is hopeful. Christine Käppeler
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