Berlin Verlag 2010

Notes are simple to draft and can be written quickly, almost effortlessly. They capture fleeting thoughts, memories, or ideas. Often there is no overarching theme to bind them together, although taken in their entirety they develop a dynamic of their own. Henning Ritter was the long-standing humanities editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). For several decades, he kept notes on his thoughts about literature, public debate, and European philosophy. While his entries sometimes fill the page and are aphoristically concise at others, they are always deep and trenchant. Ritter’s Notebooks won him the 2011 Leipzig Book Prize.