Should German schools stop teaching classics like Goethe?
'Among Friends - Unter Freunden'
The Goethe-Institut USA "is launching a nationwide campaign to celebrate and strengthen transatlantic friendship", Among Friends - Unter Freunden -- including sending two authors On the Road "to bring the transatlantic partnership to life for a new generation and to foster a vibrant literary exchange between Germany and the United States"; see also the Sabine Kieselbach report at Deutsche Welle, Young German authors on the road in Trump's USA.
I wonder what the over-under is on the INS grabbing them somewhere along the way.
The legend of a man selling his soul to the devil ‘seems to have particular resonance at times of moral crisis’, writes Benjamin Ramm.
“Politicians promise you heaven before an election and give you hell after,” wrote the anarchist Emma Goldman. The experience of the legendary Doctor Faustus, who sells his soul to the demon Mephistopheles in return for worldly knowledge and pleasure, has been treated as a metaphor for unholy political pacts. It may even shed light on our own populist moment, from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump. Why does this 500-year-old folk legend resonate in times of crisis, and why does it continue to haunt the Western imagination?
Santa Fe Poet Arthur Sze Is Selected As US Poet Laureate
For the Finders of Bodies in Murder Mysteries
Pray for her now, the cleaner
arriving at dawn, unlocking,
humming idly as she dusts
till a wandering camera fastens
her face in a twist of horror.
Pray for the student rowers,
so young, so beautifully muscled,
whose oars will snag in the reeds
on a grisliness wrapped in plastic
as the soundtrack darkens its key,
or the burly, hard-hatted drivers
of gargantuan toothy machines
doomed to chew into landfills,
gulping mawfulls of garbage
to produce the critical freeze-frame:
an arm that drips from the bucket.
The lovers haunting the woods,
the children stalking their ball:
Innocent, stammering, damaged,
and dismissed by the brusque detective,
they blur. They have served their purpose.
Pray now. You will forget them
ten minutes into the action,
before the ignorable credits
in which they have no names.
——
In Jane Austen’s novel “Northanger Abbey,” Isabella Thorpe makes this passionate declaration in a conversation with Catherine Morland, one of Austen’s young heroines. While Isabella’s character is insincere, the line resonates beyond its context. Known for her shrewd social commentary, Austen often used her fiction to explore the complexities of love — romantic, familial, and platonic alike.
Here, the insistence on “loving wholly” suggests that genuine connection requires authenticity, generosity, and being thoroughly present rather than polite restraint or self-serving calculation. Austen’s message endures to this day: Our relationships deepen when we risk vulnerability and invest fully in others. Emotional distance may offer protection, but wholehearted sincerity fosters the connections that grow into lasting affection.
Ruritanian romance, a genre of literature, film etc, with stories set in a fictional country, usually in the Balkan, Central or Eastern Europe, used for example in ‘Prisoner of Zelda’, ‘Duck Soup’, ‘Pale fire’, ‘King in New York’, ‘Castle of Cagliostro’, ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’.
(These are the sort of factoids I’m into as a bookshop owner now).
Such stories are typically swashbuckling adventure novels, tales of high romance and intrigue, centered on the ruling classes, almost always aristocracy and royalty, although (for instance) Winston Churchill’s novel Savrola, in every other way a typical example of the genre, concerns a revolution to restore rightful parliamentary government in the republican country of Laurania. The themes of honor, loyalty and love predominate, and the works frequently feature the restoration of legitimate government after a period of usurpation or dictatorship.
Czech out and read more about the genre