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- How Russians protested in August 1968 when Soviet Russia invaded Czechoslovakia
- Street Life and Morals — an interview with Lesley Chamberlain
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- On a Novel by John Barth and a harrowing illegal abortion scene: think again ‘pro-lifers’!
- Ghislaine Maxwell: J’ACCUSE!
- Russia as a Eurasian Power — the history
- Russia in my lifetime : a tragic story Central Moscow in April 1992 was a jumble sale. Trestle tables obstructed the pavements, old counterpanes covered them. Mostly older people, mostly women, displayed trinkets for sale: a cup, a few beads, a spare tin. Outside the Bolshoi Theatre sheet music – bound conductors’ scores even– waited for a chance buyer. They were like cultural treasure turned out of safe-keeping by a marauding army. Over in Sokolniki park at the Sunday market Red Army uniforms were going for a song. The entire Soviet past was ridiculed. It made me feel uncomfortable. I cast my mind back twenty years earlier to my first contact with Communist Russia, when a planeload of young Western visitors who should have known better applauded when we took off for home again. Mostly they didn’t like the food. In Nizhny Novgorod I knew a woman who had been an Intourist travel guide. She knew her lines by heart. ‘You tell the visitor so much they don’t need to ask questions. Isn’t that right, Lesley?’ Galya had a nervous breakdown when both her technique and her beloved knowledge of Soviet history and culture were made redundant overnight. The Cold War, and its end, were a painful business.
- The Old Men at the Zoo: Novelist Angus Wilson (1913-1991) on the Riot of post-war Britain
- A Meeting with Isaiah Berlin and a few reflections on his quarrel with Roger Scruton
- A Meeting with Isaiah Berlin and a few reflections on his quarrel with Roger Scruton
- From Weimar to Washington: The Collapse of the House of Bourgeois Ideas – Part 1
- How Tolstoy named an adulterer — the great writer 110 years on
- The Crown The Making of A National Epic
- The Agonies of George Steiner
- Roger Scruton – A Personal Memoir
- A giant step, but for whom?
- Le Carre’s Agent in a New Field
- A European View of Jeremy Corbyn
- Letter to Nietzsche
- Van Gogh in Kent: the inspiration he took forward from his days in England
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Category Archives: German Literature
Street Life and Morals — an interview with Lesley Chamberlain
The London-based philosopher John Robinson interviewed me in summer 2022 about my book Street Life and Morals German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime (Reaktion Books, 2021)This is an extract from that interview, which was entitled ‘The Philosophers of Bare Life’. LC: … Continue reading
Posted in Frankfurt School, German Literature, Philosophy and Philosophers, Street Life and Morals, Things German, Writing
Tagged german neo-kantians, Hannah Arendt, Heidegger, Kant, Max Horkheimer, philosophy and Hitler, Theodor Adorno, things german, twentieth-century german philosophy, Walter Benjamin
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From Weimar to Washington: The Collapse of the House of Bourgeois Ideas – Part 1
The term ‘collapsed house of bourgeois ideas’ was coined by the between-the-wars German writer Siegfried Kracauer and suggests some alarming parallels between the current chaos in the United States — the storming of the Capitol by a violent mob — and … Continue reading
Posted in German Literature, History of Bourgeois Experience, Philosophy and Philosophers, Street Life and Morals, Things German, Writing
Tagged Ernst Cassirer, Georg Lukacs, Georg Simmel, german neo-kantians, Hannah Arendt, heinrich rickert, hermann cohen, Martin Buber, Max Horkheimer, philosophy, siegfried kracauer, Theodor Adorno, things german, twentieth-century german philosophy, Walter Benjamin
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The Agonies of George Steiner
George Steiner, literary critic and polymath, has died aged 90. The problem Steiner he faced professionally in Britain and America, and particularly in English academia, was that his enormous breath of knowledge seemed somehow bogus. He achieved grudging recognition on … Continue reading
Letter to Nietzsche
The letter below was commissioned as part of an initiative this year to mark 175 years since the writer and philosopher, classicist and composer Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Röcken, in the German province of Saxony. The editors, Elmar Schenkel … Continue reading
A German Idealist on Globalization – and what he might have to say to an anti-Brexiteer
Rüdiger Safranski is one of the best-known philosophers in contemporary Germany. Together with his many prizes, the highly rated television programme, Philosophisches Quartett, ‘The Philosophical Quarter’, he has presented with Peter Sloterdijk, since 2002, has secured his name. In … Continue reading
Adorno, the Frankfurt School and the Soul of Europe
No one who has read Theodore Adorno would have been surprised by last summer’s Charlie Hebdo cartoon when Amatrice, an Italian town otherwise known for its pasta sauce, suffered a fatal earthquake. The French magazine with its satirical pasta shapes … Continue reading
Shakespeare and Wagner or Turning the Bard Inward
What is it links Shakespeare and Wagner? Almost a hundred years ago Edgar Istel examined how Wagner borrowed from Measure for Measure to create his early opera Das Liebesverbot (The Ban on Love)and set out how Wagner read Shakespeare and … Continue reading
Victor Klemperer, the German-Jewish academic who chronicled everyday life in Hitler’s Germany
Victor Klemperer was a German-Jewish academic whose survival of the Hitler years made possible his unique and irreplaceable testimony. Through 1931-1945 he kept detailed diaries of daily life in Dresden. There were sketches of a few friends who became Nazi … Continue reading
Thomas Mann, Freud and Music
Thomas Mann’s reputation as a writer rests on three or four great achievements. One was to have achieved the consummate novel of ideas.[1] In the quarter century after his death in 1955 this view prevailed. The Magic Mountain (1924) was … Continue reading
Lesley Chamberlain 