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Cover of the Graphic novel © Reinhard Kleist, The Boxer, Selfmadehero 2014

Several of us at the Jewish Museum Berlin have observed that, over the last few years, the market for young adult literature has begun to demonstrate a growing interest in the subject of Nazism and the Holocaust. In the coming weeks, we will be introducing contemporary and classic works on this topic that we have read and discussed together.

What happened to the people who survived the concentration camps – what was life like afterwards? For their families, their children, the survivors themselves?

Alan Scott Haft’s father Hertzko Haft was a vicious and violent man, the polar opposite of what we would consider today to be a “good father.” Many years passed before Alan Scott Haft understood – and he didn’t really want to know – why his father was that way.

At some point he learned a little more: → continue reading

During the week of 21 to 27 October 2013, the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin, in cooperation with Kulturkind e.V., will host readings, workshops, and an open day for the public with the theme “Multifaceted: a book week on diversity in children’s and young adult literature.” Employees of various departments have been vigorously reading, discussing, and preparing a selection of books for the occasion. Some of these books have already been introduced here over the course of the last weeks.
When my little 6-year-old daughter said to me, “you know, Mama, being gay seems strange to me,” I didn’t discuss it with her for too long. Instead I headed out and bought a copy of Alles Familie! Vom Kind der neuen Freundin vom Bruder von Papas früherer Frau und anderen Verwandten (All in the Family! About Daddy’s ex-wife’s brother’s new girlfriend’s kid and other relatives) since nothing is strange in this book. Every form of cohabitation that people engage in is introduced completely impartially: → continue reading

A Novel – Not Just for Grown-ups

During the week of October 21 to 27, 2013 the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin, in cooperation with Kulturkind e.V., will host readings, workshops, and an open day for the public with the theme “Multifaceted: a book week on diversity in children’s and young adult literature.” Employees of various departments have been vigorously reading, discussing, and preparing a selection of books for the occasion. Some of these books will be introduced here over the course of the next few months.

The Hohenemser Literature Prize was recently given for the third time, an award bestowed upon German-language writers whose native language isn’t German. The call for submissions reads:

“In a convincing literary way, these writers should address not only emigrant experiences but also the intertwining of different cultural traditions and biographical influences. With a free choice of subjects, they will acknowledge the background of a continuously changing present – a present in which language, literature, and identity itself, can in no way be considered constants.”

The first prizewinner, in 2009, was Michael Stavaric, the author of Gaggalagu. This year the prize was given to Sasa Stanisic, who was born in 1978 in Bosnian Visegrad and moved to Germany in 1992 as a refugee of the civil war.

In his first published novel from the year 2006, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, his hero Aleksandar Krsmanovic – “Comrade in Chief of the unfinished” – tells heart-wrenching stories full of black humor, narrated in the brightest colors, about life in Visegrad. → continue reading