Overcast cobalt, tile unbolted, pictures / On loan require empty space / Like an expletive. Grisaille pigeons, / Endemic to our swamp of / Commission.

An exhibition of works on paper by the major German artist.

“The book can draw in different audiences without catering to them. There’s a kind of rigorous hospitality, an aperture for dialogue.”

Slow sonnets for Alexander Kluge

Often translated as “Family Constellation,” Familienaufstellung is a form of therapy developed in the 1990s by the German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger with roots in existential psychology, Gestalt psychology, and psychodynamic therapy.

Nicotine, the author’s third novel in as many years, dives into the world of East Coast anarchists.

That’s what we said. At the Ows-land-er-be-horde, the office for foreigners, pantheon of come backs of stays of goes, place to renew and apply.

“It’s so important to make your own little specks of peace around you. It’s a matter of being an idiot.”

“A precisely aimed reach into the immeasurable flow of things.”

“Anyone who has ever visited a slum knows that the worst part is not the wretched shacks, the dust, the rusty water tanks, the crowds of people, crime, etcetera, but the smell.”

Nearly four decades after its release, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s sci-fi epic, World on a Wire, has been digitally remastered by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, and is currently screening at the Independent Film Channel Center in Lower Manhattan.

Looking at Monika Baer’s drawings and her bare but lush paintings, I was reminded of how a motif’s treatment depends on the artist’s dual perspective of familiarity and detachment, which led me to think of the “first landscape,” the one we encountered as children. 

I first came across Charline von Heyl’s paintings in the mid-’90s. She had moved to New York from Germany in 1994, having had her first New York solo show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery.

Few fiction writers have captured the painful realities of the Holocaust as well as Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. He speaks here of the power of memory, the power of the spirit, and the place of religion and homeland as he has come to know it.

Volker Schlondorff has made a name for himself adapting the works of literary giants like Proust, Grass, and Atwood. He speaks with Claudia Steinberg on the eve of German Reunification.

Filmmaker Alexander Kluge delves into the cultural significance of film and television with Gary Indiana in this 1989 conversation. A series of Kluge’s films is currently screening at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn.

Photograph of police restraining rowdy onlookers during a prize giving to President Sengh of Senegal in 1969, Frankfurt by Angela Neúke.

A portfolio of artists’ works curated and introduced by Saul Ostrow.

A piece on European art and its sensibility, titled Something Different, by Stephen Ellis.

When I used to go to Berlin before Hitler came to power, my friend Hans Siemsen, a German writer now but rarely read or remembered, always guided me in my choices of readings in contemporary German literature.