Series: German List

Max Weber famously described politics as 'a strong, slow drilling through hard boards with both passion and judgement'. Taking this as his inspiration, Alexander Kluge brings readers yet another literary masterpiece - a kaleidoscopic meditation on the tools available to those who struggle for power. The Drill certainly embodies intelligent tenacity as a precondition for political change. But what is...

Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light, by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the “she” in Beckett’s play. This unnamed female similarly recalls other significant women protagonists in Handke’s own work, such as The...

This collection of four stories is, as long-time fans of Thomas Bernhard would expect, bleakly comic and inspiringly rancorous. The subjects of the stories vary: in one, Goethe summons Wittgenstein to discuss the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; 'Montaigne: A Story in Twenty-Two Instalments' tells of a young man sealing himself in a tower to read; 'Reunion', meanwhile, satirises that very impulse to...

August is Christa Wolf’s last piece of fiction, written in a single sitting as an anniversary gift to her husband. In it, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946, a real-life event that was the inspiration for the closing scenes of her 1976 novel Patterns of Childhood. This time, however, the story unfolds through...