In interview, Krakow poet Ewa Lipska offers a rich portrait of her homeland’s literary heritage: from fighting the communist regime, when books were everything and some poetry volumes had print runs of 10,000, to writing this year for the Polish rapper O.S.T.R.
Should anti-democratic populism continue to cast a shadow across the continent, Europe may well succumb to a creeping process of disintegration, warns Jan-Werner Müller. Now is the time for renewed political engagement, if Europe’s democracies are not to start slowly corroding from within.
Memories of World War I are being recycled, restaged and transformed for the future. And a common historical frame allowing European nations to remember their stories collectively is within reach: an opportunity we cannot afford to squander, writes Aleida Assmann.
The new European debate on laws, borders and human rights was the subject of this year’s Eurozine conference, held in Conversano from 3 to 6 October, and co-organized by La Fondazione Giuseppe Di Vagno and Eurozine partner journal Lettera internazionale.
The Tornio River forms the border between Sweden and Finland, and flows into the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea. Throughout the ages, writes Rosa Liksom, the world’s travellers have navigated the river with a view to finding out about the mystical North.
Does anyone feel genuinely at home in the age of global gentrification? Probably not, writes Agri Ismail, certainly not if the experience of the Kurdish diaspora is anything to go by. But so long as a Swedish song plays in an Irish pub in a chain hotel in Kurdistan, some sense of security remains.
Let’s not confuse contemporary social atomization with freedom as a complex project that requires some degree of cooperation and mutual support, says César Rendueles. And reject, once and for all, the technological ideology that extols cooperation and community building only when these are mediated by digital technologies.
Sonja Pyykkö speaks to György Dragomán about the inspiration for his highly successful novel “The White King”, which has been translated into at least 28 languages and draws on the author’s experience of growing up in a totalitarian state, near the border between Romania and Hungary.
All but invisible in his home country, Sergei Dovlatov became something of a mythical figure among the Russian diaspora of New York. Indeed, Vladimir Yermakov compares the conundrum of Dovlatov’s life as writer to the two hands simultaneously drawing one another in Escher’s mysterious drawing.
From the planned rewilding of London’s Upper Lea Valley to performance indicator software designed to manage 663 of China’s largest cities, Warren Karlenzig knows what he’s talking about when it comes to urban sustainability projects. And yet he’s never been more daunted by the dizzying speed of growth and unfathomable scale of today’s cities.
The German copyright on Mein Kampf expires in 2015, renewing debate on whether it should be reprinted, or even read. Sascha Feuchert, expert in Holocaust literature and vice president of German PEN, believes an academic version is vital. Charlotte Knobloch, former vice president of the World Jewish Congress, is of a different opinion.
How can it be that, in contrast to the international community, virtually no one in Russia believed that Russian-backed separatists shot down the Malaysian Airlines plane in July? Beyond press censorship, Lev Gudkov looks to Russians themselves, who increasingly hear only what they want to. His analysis draws extensively on research conducted by the Levada Center, presented here in numerous tables and graphs.
Every system has its flaws and every flaw can be exploited any time. Hence the permanent need for updates. But as Russia takes its revenge in eastern Ukraine and attacks on Ukrainian consciousness, trust and infrastructure become ever more devious, what does the future hold? Oksana Forostyna remains optimistic about the chances of modest success, at the very least.
A journey that takes one beyond the limits of human imagination: this is how Fabrizio Gatti describes his experience of a week spent undercover among immigrant labourers in Puglia in order to report on the horrors that these modern slaves endure.
With Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the military conflict in eastern Ukraine, the era of post-Soviet tolerance of blurred identities and multiple loyalties has ended. Borderlands, writes Tatiana Zhurzhenko, have once again turned into bloodlands.