Summary of Merkur 4/2008
Music and architecture, film and literature – the April issue (number 707) offers culture people a wide variety of topics. Jens Hagestedt explains the difference between serious and popular music without pitting one against the other; Andreas Kuhlmann compares Wilhelm Furtwängler's and Thomas Mann's understandings of "German culture"; and Jens Malte Fischer follows the recent debate over Hans Pfitzner: a major composer and/or a major Nazi?
Deftly defying the legitimate basic rule that one should read everything by Kafka but nothing about him, Burkhard Müller opens the issue with an essay on Kafka's animal parables. (It's no surprise that Müller recently won the Kerr Prize.) The number's literary phalanx is bolstered by contributions from Michael Maar, who lovingly traces Proustian sloppiness, and Jörg Drews, who movingly salutes Walter Kempowski.
Is one of the most important works of film, Coppola's Godfather trilogy, representative of American ideology or, even better, mythology?, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht asks. Detlev Schöttker is interested less in the inhospitality of our cities than in their unreality: Why did post-WWII reconstruction play such a small role in German literature – and why even less in the western Federal German Republic than in the eastern German Democratic Republic?
In addition, Ulrike Ackermann's sociology column gives an overdue warning to those who now also accuse the West of an "enlightenment fundamentalism"; Norbert Bolz praises Heinz Schlaffer's Nietzsche study; Hans Rudolf Vaget is attuned to the fact that the Olympic games in Peking wear a "non-political" disguise not dissimilar to Berlin's in 1936; Uwe Jochum exposes the most recent charlatanry of our scholarly enterprises: the ranking system.
Published 2008-04-07
Original in German
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