Some children’s books are not children’s books, because they are not intended as books for children. They’re books for bookworms and those who love everything...

In the 1970s there was a classic French intellectual dispute between, on the one hand, the historian Fernand Braudel, who studied history from the point of view of the longue durée – developments ...

Exile is a grave. Historical epochs, things and peoples vanish in it. Yet, often they are suddenly back in the public consciousness, if for example the ancestors open an old chest...

It was Easter-time in 1968 when I first visited Haiti, which is often mistaken for Tahiti, sometimes even for Hawaii. “How much do we have to pay you, so you’ll finally stop writing about..

The two main characters, Sarah and Franz, meet at Schloss Hainfeld*, which 180 years ago was home to the Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall. Both protagonists ...

All those who may now feel caught in a dreadful predicament – on the one hand, wanting to embrace the necessity of a united Europe, while on the other no longer finding any arguments to defend the EU ...

What happens when two people meet, look at each other and know that from now on they will stay together, that they want to talk, to be intimate and to love each other? ...

The favourite prediction about the ‘conflict of cultures’ is an ideological construct that quickly loses obvious meaning when applied to everyday life. Rasha Khayat concentrates on this theme in her ...

A central image in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is the echo experienced in the Marabar Caves...

Culture is a thin varnish covering the chasms of barbarianism. Disasters churn it up; they are the well-spring of contradictions: collective solidarity and unconventional force. Jonas Lüscher’s much ...