Of course, the trend toward polemically discursive books with a biographical slant is not entirely new. There have been numerous publications that predate this trend. Consider, for example, Leslie Jamison’s Die Empathie-Tests (The Empathy Exams, 2015) Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, (2017) or Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Warum ich nicht länger mit Weissen über Hautfarbe spreche (Why I Don’t Talk to White People About Race Anymore, 2019). Striking, however, is that while biographical-political essays initially had been penned by authors from the English-speaking world, this genre is now a significant player within the German non-fiction market.
Author Theresia Enzensberger takes a different tack in her book “Schlafen” (Sleeping). While she repeatedly refers to her own struggles with insomnia, she uses it more as a prompt for an inspiring potpourri of philosophical late-night reflections. These range from a critique of our neoliberal, 24/7 society to a meditation on how sleepwalking challenges our notions of dreams and reality. Matthias Brandt chooses yet another approach in “Nein sagen” (Saying No). The actor, whose father was former Chancellor Willy Brandt, expands upon a speech he had delivered in 2025, at the Berlin-Plötzensee Memorial in memory of the resistance fighters of July 20, 1944. Brandt allows his readers to share in his own inner conflicts and that makes the work particularly compelling. As an artist, who has chosen a very different path than his renowned father, he feels ill-equipped to engage in political interventions. Despite these misgivings, however, he fortunately has allowed himself to be persuaded otherwise. In this book, he vividly describes a postwar era, in which his parents had to defend themselves against the virulent hostility of former Nazis. And while his parents knew precisely who the enemies of democracy were, and most importantly how to deal with them, later generations are no longer equipped to deal with ruthless right-wing extremists—and this is something they urgently must learn today.
This factor alone, however, does not suffice as an explanation for its increasing success, especially given that the boom in biographically peppered essays of the mid-2000s had so quickly floundered. It was the era in which social media platforms like Facebook had emerged, where blogs and digital journals thrived, and online journalism had reached its pinnacle of success. Back then, as Jia Tolentino predicted in her New Yorker in 2017 article “Personal Essay Boom,” the end was in sight, mentioning in this context sites such as Jezebel, Gawker, and Salon. These texts often relied on confessional pieces that were as intimate as they were opinionated, whether dealing with menstrual cramps or experiences of poverty. Precisely because these texts—most of which were also churned out quickly—often came across as intrusive, a sense of media overload set in quite soon.
Ewald Frie eloquently writes about his own upbringing in the Münsterland region of the 1960s, yet at its core, the book is about the disappearance of a rural world that followed entirely different rules —a world in which, for example, children celebrated their name day rather than their birthday. Theresia Enzensberger also describes her sleepless nights, but at its core, she analyzes a society obsessed with productivity that suffers from a collective sleep disorder. And after much hesitation, Matthias Brandt finally decided to intervene politically as the AfD now threatens to become an existential danger German democracy.
About the Author
Nils Markwart, born in Grevesmühlen in 1986, studied literature and social sciences at Humboldt University in Berlin. He worked as an editor at Philosophie Magazin and the weekly newspaper Der Freitag, and has also written for publications including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Republik Magazin, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. He has been a contributing editor at Die Zeit since 2022.
Translated by Zaia Alexander
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