On Writing

Building Bridges

By fern | Shadows of the Holocaust

Gert: January 1, 2010 Building Bridges Between Incompatible Spaces The magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, my favorite daily newspaper, recently carried a long and fascinating interview with two famous Jewish-German writers: Henryk M. Broder and Maxim Biller. The interview is a kind of intellectual fighting match, full of humour, wit, and irony, focussing on their work, their roles and identities, and their relationship (which hardly seems to exist). I know ...

By fern | Shadows of the Holocaust

You will probably remember what I told you about César Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano recently: that I considered it one of the most beautiful violin sonatas I knew, that I had found a partner who will accompany me on the piano (even if not in all movements; it is very difficult even for professional pianists) and that I had decided to take up violin lessons again to improve ...

By fern | Shadows of the Holocaust

Gert Krell, December 6, 2009 “Der Klang der Worte” is a film about a group of Jewish Holocaust survivors in Israel who write poems and short stories in German. They are members of the “Verband deutschsprachiger Schriftsteller in Israel” (Union of German-Speaking Writers in Israel). “Why should we let Hitler take away our native language?” says one of them at the beginning. They came from Germany, Austria or the Bukovina ...