A review of German culture in the English-language media

Rafaël Newman considers the tumultuous lifespan of painter Max Liebermann (1847–1935) and an intriguing new exhibit at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, “Roads Not Taken,” on key caesuras in German history between 1989 and 1848.  (3 Quarks Daily, 1/30/23)

Beautiful! “German photographer Jan Prengel looks beyond still life—instead capturing flowers and plant stems in motion, over an exposure time of 2–3 seconds.”  (Aesthetica, 1/19/23)

Sebastian Smee contemplates Two Men Contemplating the Moon, one of Caspar David Friedrich’s best-known masterpieces.  (The Washington Post, 1/4/23)

Emanuel Leutze painted his two versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware in Düsseldorf, shortly after the failed revolutions of 1848. “His intention was not to ignite the patriotic passions of Americans, but to inspire his fellow Germans to be as patriotic as he knew Americans were.”  (The Washington Post, 12/25/22)

“FANTASTIC FUTURISTIC FATALISTIC”: See how Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was marketed to audiences all over the world through this gallery of vintage movie posters.  (Open Culture, 12/16/22)

Onkel Toms Hütte is one of Berlin’s most distinctive U-Bahn stations, with a name that references Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, a long-gone Biergarten, and a modernist housing development designed by Bruno Taut. Once a flashpoint in the great “roof war” of 1928, it’s now the center of a 21st-century controversy about the anti-Black slur that “Uncle Tom” has become. NPR, (7/30/08; Atlas Obscura, 1/19/17; The Washington Post, 11/27/22)

“Almost safe, she returned to Munich and lost her painting and her life”: A Renaissance portrait owned by Ilse Hesselberger, who was deported and murdered in 1941, is now being auctioned to benefit Holocaust survivors and other charitable causes.  (The New York Times, 11/22/22)

Dylan Moriarty had no grand plans for his trip to Germany, but he knew he wanted to illustrate it: “A camera is one way to capture the world, but the meditation of re-creating moments in ink felt like a better, more personal tribute.”  (The Washington Post, 10/15/22)

A “showpiece of socialist realist architecture” in Potsdam gets a new lease on life as the Minsk Kunsthaus.  (The Guardian, 10/2/22)

The Slavs and Tatars art collective in Berlin, with activities “rooted in the giant swath of land between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China,” publishes books, puts on interactive performances and installations, and runs Pickle Bar pop-ups around the world.  (The New York Times, 9/22/22)

Meet Winold Reiss, “the German modernist who painted a multicultural United States.” His subjects included Langston Hughes, members of the Blackfeet Nation, and a very young Isamu Noguchi.  (Hyperallergic, 8/25/22; The New York Times, 8/25/22)

“By collecting water towers the way someone else might collect cookie jars, they cut industry down to size.” Bernd and Hilla Becher are at last getting their due at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  (The Art Newspaper, 7/13/22; The New York Times, 7/28/22)

In praise of the Plattenbau: “In a new book, Jesse Simon presents these structures in all their grid-like beauty.”  (Aesthetica, 2/24/22)

“It was wrong to take the bronzes and it was wrong to keep them.” Germany is returning two Benin bronzes and more than one thousand other items from its museums’ collections to Nigeria.  (Artnet, 6/29/22; The Guardian, 7/1/22)

Documenta 15 couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start, but there’s a lot more to see—including vegetable plots, a skateboard halfpipe, a sauna on the lawn of a Baroque castle, and a floating stage on the Fulda River.  (The Guardian, 6/23/22; The New York Times, 6/24/22; Hyperallergic, 6/28/22)

A mural with offensive imagery is removed, and a panel on antisemitism hastily convened, at Documenta 15. (Artnet, 6/21/22; ARTnews, 6/29/22; The New Fascism Syllabus, 7/24/22)

Candida Höfer’s stunning photographs of empty museums, libraries, cathedrals, and theaters “have acquired a haunting resonance during the pandemic.”  (Financial Times, 2/19/22)

A hospital in Erlangen is the only surviving building in Germany where patients with mental illness were systematically murdered in the Nazi era. It is now slated for demolition, over the protests of those who seek to preserve it as a site of remembrance.  (The Spectator, 4/23/23)

In Germany today, more than 4,000 public monuments commemorate the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II. Their ongoing protection is driven by “a mixture of bureaucratic drift, aversion to change and a rock-solid commitment to honoring the victims of Nazi aggression that trumps any shifts in global affairs.”  (The New York Times, 4/28/23)

“To reexamine the connections among the Third Reich, the genocide of the Herero and Nama, and other colonial crimes is to throw a more critical light on a broader arc of German history, including the Wilhelmine period. It means understanding that colonialism had long-term consequences not only for the colonized but also for the colonizers.”  (The New York Review, 3/9/23)

Rafaël Newman considers the tumultuous lifespan of painter Max Liebermann (1847–1935) and an intriguing new exhibit at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, “Roads Not Taken,” on key caesuras in German history between 1989 and 1848.  (3 Quarks Daily, 1/30/23)

What does it mean for a society to master its past, and what is the role of individual citizens? Despite the existence of an extensive archive for the files of the East German secret police, a recent study shows that “the majority of people on whom the Stasi kept files have not opened them.”  (The Guardian, 11/28/22)

“It was wrong to take the bronzes, and it was wrong to keep them for 120 years.” Germany has begun the process of repatriating its more than one thousand plundered Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. When will other countries follow suit?  (The New York Times, 12/20/22; The Guardian, 12/20/22)

“Rachel Posner, a rabbi’s wife in Kiel, Germany, took a photograph in 1931 that she had no idea would one day resonate with people across the world.” Ninety years later years after the Posner family fled for their lives, their descendants and renowned menorah have returned to Kiel.  (The New York Times, 12/19/22)

“The impression one gets from these sanitized histories is that this was a man who had materialized out of nowhere, with no discernible past, like an astrophysical Mary Poppins who had come to teach the people of Huntsville how to make rockets.” U.S. institutions have a long way to go in examining their relationship with pivotal figures of the Nazi war machine, such as Alfried Krupp and Wernher von Braun.  (The New York Times, 12/13/22)

The newly renamed Manga-Bell-Platz and Cornelius-Fredericks-Straße in Berlin’s “African Quarter” now honor African resisters, not German colonizers.  (The Guardian, 12/2/22)

“Many of Germany’s most powerful memorials did not begin as state-sanctioned projects, but emerged—and are still emerging—from ordinary people outside the government who pushed the country to be honest about its past.”  (The Atlantic, 11/14/22)

“While we tend to think of courts as the guardrails of democracy, in 1920s Germany they were among its most implacable and insidious enemies.”  (The Washington Post, 10/29/22)

Germany’s fight over which weapons to give Ukraine, says Anne Applebaum, is really a fight over the lessons of 1945. Which is more important: preventing another genocide in Europe, “even if that means a military engagement,” or preventing “war at all costs by refusing to engage in one”?  (The Atlantic,  10/20/22)

Murdered at Dachau in March 1933, Arthur Kahn is believed to be the Holocaust’s first Jewish victim. Mattie Kahn honors and grieves the great-uncle she never knew.  (The Atlantic, 5/5/22)

The Habsburg empress Elisabeth is enjoying a 21st-century media moment—but this isn’t your grandma’s Sisi.  (The Guardian, 7/8/22; The New York Times, 10/7/22)

Not so banal after all: Hours of old tape recordings—once inaccessible to Israeli prosecutors, but now the basis of a new documentary—expose Adolf Eichmann’s “visceral, ideological antisemitism, his zeal for hunting down Jews and his role in the mechanics of mass murder.”  (The New York Times, 7/4/22)

When thousands of perpetrators of Nazi-era war crimes were still alive, German prosecutors were reluctant to pursue them. Now 90- and even 100-somethings are being charged as accessories to murder.  (The Irish Times, 7/2/22)

“It was wrong to take the bronzes and it was wrong to keep them.” Germany is returning two Benin bronzes and more than one thousand other items from its museums’ collections to Nigeria.  (Artnet, 6/29/22; The Guardian, 7/1/22)

“Putin’s selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state’s historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.”   (The Conversation, 2/26/22; The New Fascism Syllabus, 2/26/22; New Statesman, 3/2/22)

“Germany’s much-vaunted memory culture,” writes Eric Langenbacher, “is no longer producing the progressive effects that were always a key justification behind it.” Instead, it’s leading to inaction and “providing moralistic cover for anti-democratic, autocratic threats.”  (The New York Times, 1/25/22; AICGS, 2/14/22)

An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith, is “a fine example of everyone’s favourite genre: the genre-defying book, inspired by history, filtered through imagination and finished with a jeweller’s eye for detail.”  (The Guardian, 12/4/20;  The White Review, 1/2021)

“The underlying Ostpolitik gambit of Egon Bahr, Brandt’s adviser, was a judo throw: entice your heavy, slow-moving opponent, the Soviet Union, to lean so far into your embrace that with a skilful twist you can throw him over your shoulder. Now it is Putin, a judo black belt, who is trying to throw heavy, slow-moving Germany over his shoulder.”  (Financial Times, 2/9/22)

“A cult voice of East German feminist literature” is finally getting her due in English. Lucy Jones’s translation of Brigitte Reimann’s novel Die Geschwister (Siblings) will be published by Penguin in February, fifty years after the author’s premature death.  (The Guardian, 1/4/23; The New Yorker, 3/27/23)

Sibylle Berg’s Grime, newly translated by Tim Mohr, “is a novel so caustic it should be printed with hydrochloric acid.” Berg “sprays her fury across the whole landscape of technological and economic manias that are rendering the 21st century intolerable.”  (The Washington Post, 12/13/22)

The rules of gender in German-speaking Europe are bending, and Kim de l’Horizon is leading the way. They received the 2022 German Book Prize for Blutbuch, “a formally adventurous work centering on a nonbinary character, also named ‘Kim,’ grappling with gender identity while exploring the traumatic histories of women in their Swiss family.”  (The New York Times, 11/30/22)

Gudrun Pausewang’s 1987 novel Die Wolke (The Cloud), about a fictional nuclear accident, was standard reading for young West Germans. “To this day, critics argue over whether she empowered children—or traumatised them for life.”  (BBC, 11/3/22)

In memoriam: Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929–2022), “free-spirited intellectual who suggested a new literary direction for the country out of the rubble of World War II, writing poems, essays, novels and travelogues that were by turns witty and incisive, united by their vivid imagery and close attention to detail.”  (Deutsche Welle, 11/25/22; The Washington Post, 11/28/22; n+1, 11/29/22)

Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Oppermanns “reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time.”  It has just been rereleased with a revised translation by Joshua Cohen.  (The New York Times, 10/3/22; The New York Times, 10/6/22; The Atlantic, 12/19/22)

In the new novel Identitti author Mithu Sanyal and translator Alta Price “take readers on a wild ride in which every assumption about race, interpersonal relationships, and academic language is brought under scrutiny.” (Words without Borders, 9/1/22; The New York Times, 9/29/22; Los Angeles Review of Books, 10/24/22)

The Ravensburger Verlag withdrew two children’s books based on the work of Karl May, who created an utterly fanciful—but wildly successful—world of cowboys and Indians at the end of the 19th century; his 21st-century defenders aren’t conceding quietly. (The Guardian, 8/23/22; The Times, 9/12/22)

Karl Bartos recalls his innovative musical career in The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond, translated into English by Katy Derbyshire.  (The Guardian, 8/3/22; Clash, 8/8/22)

“A cage went in search of a bird”: There’s much to contemplate and appreciate in a beautiful new edition of Kafka’s aphorisms, translated by Shelley Frisch and introduced and edited by Reiner Stach.  (Times Literary Supplement, 4/29/22; Forward, 7/7/22)

An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith, is “a fine example of everyone’s favourite genre: the genre-defying book, inspired by history, filtered through imagination and finished with a jeweller’s eye for detail.”  (The Guardian, 12/4/20;  The White Review, 1/2021)

With the reissue of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man and Colm Tóibín’s biographical novel, Thomas Mann is having a moment. Before you pick up either one, read Alex Ross first!  (The New Yorker, 1/17/22)

“On days I don’t spend fretting over the soul of both German and my native tongue,” (Wahlberliner) Alexander Wells writes, “I can find great pleasure in Denglish—in seeing, that is, my own language made camp. . . . It can even be re-enchanting.”  (The European Review of Books, 4/19/23)

“For a region of 8 million people that is widely mocked for being boring, Lower Saxony has over the past three decades generated power networks that play a central role in German politics.”  (Foreign Policy, 1/29/23)

No longer the “roadblock at the heart of Europe”: After much hand-wringing and delay, Germany has finally agreed to deliver Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.  (The New Statesman, 1/25/23)

“Whatever the case may be, the Berliner Schnauze strikes without warning, usually unprovoked, delivering a brutal level of honesty you never asked for.”  (BBC, 12/5/22)

What’s better than a model train around the Christmas tree? A visit to Hamburg’s Miniatur Wunderland, with its 53,000 feet of track, the world’s largest model airport, and detailed tiny replicas of the world’s landmarks, “bursting with whimsy and humor.”  (The New York Times, 12/21/22)

An early-morning raid swept up more than more than two dozen co-conspirators—including Prince Heinrich XIII and a former Bundestag delegate for the AfD. It turns out they’re among the ringleaders of the Reichsbürger movement, “citizens of the Empire” who believe that the Federal Republic is a sham and sundry other conspiracy theories.  (The Guardian, 12/10/22; The New York Times, 12/11/22)

“Let’s face it: sometimes to sum up a concept in English (or Spanish or Slovenian or whatever our language) we need a word in German, even it doesn’t exist yet”: An English-language article about Freudenfreude evoked Schadenfreude for some German readers, and Freudenfreudefreude for others.  (The New York Times, 11/25/22; The Local, 12/2/22)

Look who’s back: “Global even before globalisation, Blue Nun was once the biggest name in the mass market wine business, selling a staggering 35 million bottles in 1985 alone.” (The Irish Times, 11/26/22)

Germany’s fight over which weapons to give Ukraine, says Anne Applebaum, is really a fight over the lessons of 1945. Which is more important: preventing another genocide in Europe, “even if that means a military engagement,” or preventing “war at all costs by refusing to engage in one”?  (The Atlantic,  10/20/22)

“What is Berlin afraid of that Kyiv is not?” Germany’s reluctance to send battle tanks to Ukraine is costing lives and frustrating allies.   (Financial Times, 9/14/22; Bloomberg, 9/15/22)

“German pillows are oddly huge.”  (The Wall Street Journal, 7/17/22)

The term Rasse is taboo in a way that “race” isn’t. This has consequences for German constitutional law and data collection, and for the lived reality of people in marginalized groups.  (Wired, 7/13/22)

The watershed that wasn’t? Germany’s support for the Ukrainian war effort has been maddeningly indecisive.  (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 4/29/22; Bloomberg, 5/22/22; The New York Times, 6/14/22; Tablet, 6/26/22; The Telegraph, 6/26/22; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6/27/22)

Katrin Bennhold scores quite an interview with former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, “the most prominent face” in a long era of miscalculated relations with Russia, “not only because he expresses no regret, but because he also profited handsomely from it, earning millions while promoting Russian energy interests.”  (The New York Times, 4/23/22; The New York Times, 5/1/22)

Harsh words for Germany from Volodymyr Zelensky (and other observers): “Every year politicians repeat ‘never again.’ And now, we see that these words simply mean nothing.”  (The Washington Post, 3/17/22; The New Statesman, 4/5/22; The New York Times, 4/7/22)

A Zeitenwende in German foreign policy: It was the “political cataclysm that no one saw coming—not from a novice chancellor known for his caution, not from a coalition of German parties with pacifist roots, and certainly not from a government led by the Social Democrats, with their history of close ties to Russia.”  (Bloomberg, 2/27/22; Foreign Policy, 2/27/22; German Marshall Fund, 2/28/22; The Atlantic, 3/1/22; The Washington Post, 3/1/22)

Kultur? No thank you, says Ulf Poschardt: “German pop culture is—apart from Kraftwerk and Christoph Waltz—boring, soporific, moralistic crap produced and financed by people who (always) aim for a common denominator in a society where morals and morality are more important than punch lines and success.” (Politico, 2/19/22)

“Germany’s much-vaunted memory culture,” writes Eric Langenbacher, “is no longer producing the progressive effects that were always a key justification behind it.” Instead, it’s leading to inaction and “providing moralistic cover for anti-democratic, autocratic threats.”  (The New York Times, 1/25/22; AICGS, 2/14/22)

“The underlying Ostpolitik gambit of Egon Bahr, Brandt’s adviser, was a judo throw: entice your heavy, slow-moving opponent, the Soviet Union, to lean so far into your embrace that with a skilful twist you can throw him over your shoulder. Now it is Putin, a judo black belt, who is trying to throw heavy, slow-moving Germany over his shoulder.”  (Financial Times, 2/9/22)

“The vision of foreign policy set out in Berlin’s new coalition agreement,” writes Rachel Tausendfreund, “is thus, on the whole, the right kind of feminist. It is inclusive, broad, and progressive without being binary or reactionary. It recognizes serious threats to Germany and the global order that more pacifism will not solve.”  (German Marshall Fund, 11/20/21)

Years after his lunch with a Holocaust denier and rising star of the far right, Jay Rayner “went looking to see what had become of the man who hated me because I was a Jew.” He had hoped to meet a changed man, “but real lives are murkier than that.”  (The Observer, 1/23/22)