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Ellroy, Scurati, SparkofPhoenix: love for books versus shutdown frustration

2020-12-16T18:46:47.065Z


The gift table remains empty because of the closed shops? Does not have to be. You can also order these book gifts from the cultural department online - ideally from your trusted small bookseller.


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Photo: Paul Taylor / Getty Images

For the ten year old Minecraft fan

SparkofPhoenix: "Spark and the secret of the pillager", Fischer New Media, 192 pages.

The child speaks only of 

Enderman

 and 

Netherportal

?

If it's allowed to watch TV, does it watch YouTubers

 build

with 

Redstone

?

The little adventure "Spark and the secret of the pillager" is able to pick up these young readers from the gaming world.

It's about a kidnapped iron golem, magicians, witches - and only the little hero Spark can save the golem.

The novel was probably written by the 28-year-old SparkofPhoenix.

The streamer keeps his identity a secret, which is not uncommon in the scene - and makes his fans even more curious.

Carola Padtberg

For everyone with the hobby ambivalence

Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam: "Arcadia".

Novel.

Translated from the French by Patricia Klobusiczky, Edition Secession, 392 pages, 28 euros. 

Out into the wild life, that's what everyone dreams of right now.

And the heroine of this novel, adolescent and youthful, can tell about it: heated in the erotic, cool to the heart, in dizzyingly beautiful and unusual language.

Please do not read the blurb!

Instead, follow this voice through a summer in France, into the labyrinth of conflicting sensations, and let yourself be confused.

Because we know normal.

Elke Schmitter

For everyone who has always done something good and wanted to hang it on the wall 

With the pandemic, many artists also worried about where should they exhibit their work and where should they sell?

The Briton Matthew Burrows made a digital virtue out of this need; in March he founded a global self-help group called "Artists Support Pledge".

Every »artist and maker« can offer their works via Instagram and label them specially so that they appear on the Instagram page of Burrows' initiative;

Hundreds of thousands of works are available.

Everyone has access, the expenses are limited.

No work can be more than £ 200.

If a seller reaches the sales threshold of £ 1,000 with their sales, they have to spend £ 200 on a colleague's picture.

You might even discover the next Damien Hirst - and put him under the Christmas tree, so to speak.

Ulrike Knöfel

For the young professional uncle

Tocotronic: "Say it all off - Best of 1994 - 2020" (Limited 3 LP vinyl box) 

Germany's most intellectual rock group traditionally releases their albums in January, but until mid-2021 there is probably nothing new from the band around singer Dirk von Lowtzow, which is split between Hamburg and Berlin.

Nevertheless, Tocotronic show a feeling for the pandemic zeitgeist with their appropriately titled box set »Sag alles ab«, a review of 27 years of band history with numerous rarities.

Also included: The crisis anthem »Hope« published in April.

"Lyrics and music against isolation," it says.

What more do you need?

Andreas Borcholte

For the Christmas grouch of the family

James Ellroy: "That Storm".

Ullstein Verlag, 976 pages, 35 euros.

For 40 years, James Ellroy has been delivering brick by brick for the more open-minded crime readership.

His books are less plot-driven thrillers than polyphonic symphonies of horror.

With his new work he is now setting up a superlative in his own right: almost a hundred characters do and talk about disgusting things on almost a thousand pages.

The action begins shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but there is no trace of patriotic vigor here.

Instead, Ellroy's west coast between Tijuana and Hollywood is teeming with Nazi sympathizers and porn manufacturers.

Not a single hero, not a single good news on all the many pages - this is how you make the Christmas grouch in your family happy.

Christian Buss

For Sylt fans and Sylt haters

Susanne Matthiessen: "Ocelot and Friesennerz".

Ullstein, 256 pages, 20 euros.

When the Federal Republic of Germany was still a rather musty country, many who wanted to take a deep breath drove to the far north to Sylt.

For a while, the holiday island was actually something like the German Saint Tropez - less sun, less warmth, but a lot of fresh wind and a wide view.

The author Susanne Matthiessen grew up on the island during the seventies;

her parents ran 

the

 fur business from Westerland, oh well, from all of northern Germany.

Medium-sized companies who had made money bought here just like Arndt von Bohlen and Halbach.

In “Ozelot und Friesennerz”, Matthiessen tells incredibly entertaining stories from those years that are much better than all the clichés about the island.

Her novel is a declaration of love to the original mentality of the residents and a declaration of war to all investors who want to turn Sylt into a Disneyland. 

Claudia Voigt

For survivors

Ernst Lothar: "The miracle of survival".

Zsolnay, 384 pages, 25 euros. 

When he read the sentence of a murderer who had been sentenced to rope on the morning of his execution and the delinquent cried miserably "Help" in the prison yard, Ernst Lothar, then a young public prosecutor, resigned.

This is one of the grandiose, memorable scenes that the lawyer, writer and theater director Lothar, born in Brno in 1890, portrays in his captivating biography "The Miracle of Survival".

Lothar tells of how he founded the Salzburg Festival with Max Reinhardt and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal in 1919, how he cultivated friendship in Vienna with authors such as Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel and how he was attacked as a Jew.

He reports of political errors and family tragedies, of the flight from the Nazis into exile in New York and of his return to Vienna, where he died as a highly respected theater man in 1974.

All his life he loved Austria, of which it is said here: "It is a country that is angry to death about and in which one still wants to die."

Wolfgang Höbel

For coffee drinkers

Christian Brandstätter (ed.): "The Viennese Coffee House".

Brandtstätter, 312 pages, 60 euros.

Are there any essays on the question of whether the lockdown will be followed by a crisis in Austrian literature, Austrian theater, Austrian art?

It wouldn't be surprising, simply because the coffee houses had to close for so long this year of the pandemic.

For more than 300 years, Viennese artists have enjoyed going to the coffee house to read, think, and write alone, without feeling alone.

The tremendous influence the institution had on the cultural and intellectual history of the city and the country is shown by this magnificent volume, which is peppered with historical photographs and illustrations.

“Often you get out of the coffeehouse smarter than you went in, but almost always more satisfied,” writes Doris Knecht.

It is a sentence that also applies to this book.

Tobias Becker

For those who didn't even know how crazy interesting botany can be

Stefano Mancuso: »The incredible journey of plants«.

Translated from the Italian by Andreas Thomsen with illustrations by Grisha Fisher.

Velcro-Cotta, 154 pages, 22 euros.

This lovingly illustrated volume on »The Incredible Journey of Plants« by Stefano Mancuso can be used as an all-purpose weapon in the gift jungle.

It is just as inspiring for nature lovers as it is for people who cannot tell a nettle from a rose.

The Italian professor of botany succeeds in telling the spread of spruce, coconut and co. Around the world as a drama or love story, as a thriller or historical anecdote.

Katharina Stegelmann

For Hamburg connoisseurs

Jan Bürger: "Between Heaven and Elbe - A Hamburg Cultural History".

CH Beck, 384 pages, 24 euros.

Oh, how Jan Bürger storms through the archives and the city, pulls out a crazy party report here and retells it as if he had been there, singing about the Elbphilharmonie, then with Peter Rühmkorf from his balcony looking down at the Elbe, the women and the beach - then we are right in the middle of the cultural history of this city in the wind.

Here Ulrike Meinhof dances with bare feet and Reich-Ranicki is bored, there Eva Rühmkorf becomes Hamburg's first women's representative, while her poetic husband writes: »From the back of my eye I / our men's magazines / actually a little closer / than the goals of the women's movement «.

They still loved each other, the Rühmkorfs, in Övelgönne on the Elbe beach.

So: For example, anyone who finally wants to move to Hamburg or, because he or she already lives here, has perhaps lost sight of the city's splendor, will be very happy about this clever, funny, discovery-friendly book!

Volker Weidermann

For fans of poetry and weirdness

Mieko Kawakami: »Breasts and Eggs«.

DuMont, 496 pages, 24 euros.

Mieko Kawakami's main character is reminiscent of the weird protagonists from the short stories by Miranda July, and traces of the magical limbo of Haruki Murakami can also be discovered in her social novel.

And yet the pull that her story develops is quite unique: 30-year-old Natsuko keeps her head above water with part-time jobs in Tokyo.

When her sister comes to visit - a single mother who only dreams of having her breasts operated - she also brings memories of their childhood together in poverty.

In the second part of the novel, Kawakami accompanies her protagonist eight years later.

As a successful author, Natsuko is well off in Tokyo's cultural milieu;

as an asexual woman, she is concerned with the question of whether she can still have a child.

What sounds incoherent as a plot unfolds its charm precisely because the author is clever enough to leave in the vague what she wants to tell specifically.

What Kawakami negotiates - class, womanhood, ideals of beauty, artificial insemination - only really sags after the last page.

Eva Thöne


For all cinema fans

Thomas Medicus: "Heinrich and Götz George - Two Lives".

Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2020, 416 pages, 26 euros.

Two power guys of German cinema, both expansive and extremely masculine, one the son of the other.

Thomas Medicus has written a gripping double biography: about Heinrich George, one of the big screen stars in the Third Reich, and about Götz George, who posted record ratings in the 1980s as "Tatort" commissioner Schimanski.

The author describes in detail the involvement of the father with the Nazi regime, he vividly conveys to the reader how the son had to work on the larger-than-life role model and counterpart throughout his life.

Inside views of a family dynasty.

Lars-Olav Beier

For wanderlust sufferers caught in Germany

Andreas Fahrmeir (ed.):

»

Germany.

Global history of a nation

.

CH Beck, 936 pages, 39.95 euros.

In 2017, the “Histoire mondiale de la France” became the topic of the presidential election campaign: A history of the nation, told specifically about its relationship to the rest of the world, that outraged some.

The transmission to Germany did not make such waves.

But in 177 articles a stimulating and polyphonic (172 contributors!) Picture emerges of a country that was shaped by incoming ideas and not only exerted warlike influence beyond borders.

It's about Gutenberg and the Hamburger, the VW Beetle from Mexico and the Nebra Sky Disc - as historical bites that widen your view when you can't travel out into the world. 

Felix Bayer 

For the woke student who only reads books by women on principle

Kate Chopin: "The Awakening".

Translated by Ingrid Rein.

Ars Vivendi, 22 euros.

"The Awakening" by Kate Chopin is set in the US state of Louisiana at the end of the 19th century: Edna Pontellier apparently has everything you could want - a successful husband, two great sons, a huge house in New Orleans.

Then she falls in love with the beautiful Robert while on vacation, but he just leaves.

As a kind of substitute act, she falls to another man, knowing full well that she is not interested in love, but only in passion (1899!).

Most of all, she realizes that motherhood and family do not make them happy.

So what is she doing?

What she feels like doing: she starts to paint, learns to swim and moves into her own house, without a husband or children.

Unfortunately, the whole thing doesn't end well.

What remains is the realization that 130 years ago women had a lot to say and write about. 

Laura Backes

For history buffs

Antonio Scurati: »M.

The Son of the Century «Translated from the Italian by Verena von Koskull.

Velcro-Cotta, 830 pages, 32 euros.

This F-word was on everyone's lips in 2020: fascism.

But does it even fit with current developments?

With his monumental biography of Benito Mussolini, the inventor of fascism, Antonio Scurati offers the historical perspective that the debate sometimes lacks, and dares to experiment.

In »M.

The Son of the Century «he combines short-tempered fiction with sober archive material.

This is controversial both in terms of political interpretations and stylistic means, but precisely for this reason it turns history into the passionate discussion that it should always be. 

Hannah Pilarczyk

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Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2020-12-16

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