JThe online magazine “Berlin Review” has been around for almost a month now, but so far you don't get the impression that it has attracted much attention, that it has been perceived as something really new or even necessary. And in fact: In Germany, in contrast to Great Britain and the United States, where the great “Review of Books” role models of the new magazine come from, there is no diverse feature landscape with ongoing consideration of important new publications and debates, not to mention from the intellectual magazines with their long texts?
The distinguishing feature of the new company, the gap that it wants to fill, is not immediately recognizable, and the editorial by the four editors (two women, two men) does not make it easy to guess: “What we need is literary knowledge, courage to be precise, perhaps also beauty, distraction and nerdiness. Texts that open a window and – How German Is It? – give it a good airing.” This has momentum, with its mixture of bits of English language it also has a bit of forced momentum, but it doesn’t eliminate the suspicion that the others could also be trying for this very thing, for literary knowledge, accuracy, beauty, distraction and even a little “nerdiness”. And conversely, the magazine can hardly do without the “opinion” and “interpretation” from whose current excess it wants to programmatically distance itself.
But then one of the reviews in the first issue makes it much clearer than the editorial what it could be about. “Sometimes, however, interesting things lie dormant precisely where general disinterest is greatest”: That is the last sentence of Birthe Mühlhoff’s review of the historian Peter Brown’s most recent book, his intellectual autobiography “Journeys of the Mind,” which was published last year at Princeton University Press came out. The review uses the book to trace how Brown managed to interest not only his subject, but the general educated public of the Western world in a field that in many countries did not even have a name: late antiquity and the question why “A small Jewish sect that preached poverty became, within a few centuries, the richest and most powerful institution in the entire Mediterranean.” Mühlhoff presents the book as a lesson on “how to develop your own interesting question”. And she succeeds in the feat of arousing curiosity not only about the book and the life of its author, but also about the many surprising questions that can arise from dealing with this strange time.
The position checkers in Germany
The discussion also deals with the question of how a topic can find interest beyond the usual circles of attention – and at the same time it uses its medium to demonstrate how this can be done. She actually manages to take not only the book but also its subjects seriously in unusual detail, even though these had not previously been recognized as relevant and urgent subjects for a general public. Of course, because of the prominence of its author, the book could also be considered for a review in a daily newspaper, but due to the limited space available there, the presentation there would often have to be limited to the aspects that are necessary to justify the judgment about the book are. This is the great opportunity that the length of the texts in, for example, the “New York Review of Books” and now also the “Berlin Review” opens up: it allows you to differentiate between the necessarily succinct reviews in a daily newspaper and their topics to create a link between the generously unfolding books. It can also give objects a resonance framework that they did not have before.
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