Philip Oltermann’s Keeping Up with the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters came out earlier this year.
The day before the latest elections in Athens, the German tabloid Bild published an open letter. ‘Dear Greeks,’ it read, ‘Please don’t do anything stupid … The only reason that you are able to get euros out of your cash machines is that we, the Germans, and other euro states have put them there … Tomorrow you have a choice. But it isn’t really a...
On Tuesday, 17 October 1911, 18-year-old Rudolf Ditzen, the future Hans Fallada, got up before dawn to meet his schoolfriend Hanns Dietrich von Necker at a tourist spot outside Rudolstadt in Thuringia. Some weeks beforehand, they had agreed to take each other’s lives in a double suicide, though they hadn’t been able to decide how to do it. Fallada was carrying a Tesching gun,...
The opening scene of Night Work, Thomas Glavinic’s Viennese novel, recalls something Karl Kraus said about the city in 1914: Vienna was a ‘Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs’, an experimental station for the apocalypse. Jonas, Glavinic’s protagonist, gets up one morning and switches on the TV. There is no picture, only snow. He checks the post, but the paper...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.