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Bookworld
Nonfiction or “Thing Books” – Topical Issues and Works Creating a Buzz

Kaube, Behrend, Vogl, Dardan
© Rowohlt, © C.H. Beck, © Hoffmann und Campe, © Matthes und Seitz

The German for non-fiction is “Sachbuch,” literally meaning “thing book” and designating works about real subjects rather than imaginary ones. But neither term programs much in the way of specific. So the German Non-Fiction Award, presented for the first time last year, added some guidelines. The prize is explicitly meant to honor books that “provide new impulses in social conflicts.” In addition, winners should be topical, well-researched, “narratively powerful” and addressed to a general audience.

The jury’s decision this year makes it clear that the prize is not about promoting thrown-together tracts on sensationalist, here-today-gone-tomorrow controversies. The 2021 German Non-Fiction Book of the Year is Jürgen Kaube’s cleverly constructed biography Hegel’s World. Kaube recounts the life of philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, giving readers a panoramic view of the various reforms and revolutions around 1800 and running through the political upheavals in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Along the way he touches upon everything from mandatory education to hot-air balloons and steam engines. Kaube begins his investigation by posing the question: Why do the key philosophical texts of this era have titles like Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Science of Knowledge, Phenomenology of the Spirit or Science of Logic? How did an environment of accelerated technological, scientific and economic innovation produce the philosophic movement that would come to be known as “German Idealism?” You don’t need a PhD in philosophy to understand Kaube’s biography. All readers have to have is a passion for intellectual history and a curiosity about how a period of time can be captured in human thought.

“I, a Berlin ethnologist, am the ape that wants to become human. ‘Ape’ was what the inhabitants of the Tugen Hills in Northwest Kenya called me when I visited them in 1978.” So begins Heike Behrend’s “autobiography of ethnographic research,” From Ape to Human. In it, Behrend looks back in clear, sober but nuanced language upon decades of field research, recalling all the disappointed expectations, illusions, misunderstandings and difficulties that accompany the attempt to understand a different culture. On her journeys field into the field, she was called not just an “ape,” but a “fool,” “clown,” “witch, “spy,” “Satanic spirit” and “cannibal.” By summoning these words and asking where they come from, the author sheds light on how images of self and other reflect one another. Calling an academic researcher an “ape” was, for instance, a subversive response to the experience of colonial humiliation. In almost ancillary fashion, Behrend’s autobiography reprises the history of ethnography, arriving at the conclusions that distinctions between “us” and “them” are deceptive and “concepts of the Others” have long become unstable. Behrend’s widely discussed memoir was awarded this year’s Leipzig Book Fair Prize for Non-Fiction and Essays.

There has been no shortage in recent years of critical diagnoses of neo-liberalism and its inability to defend democracy against market conformism. One of the most intellectual acute and grimmest is Joseph Vogel’s “brief theory of the contemporary situation.” In Capital and Resentment, the Berlin literary scholar shows how the digital and financial economies combine to produce a new “monetative” branch of government alongside the legislative, executive and judicial ones. He also explains why platform capitalism thrives on the economic exploitation of a resentment it simultaneously both elicits and celebrates.

Whether as fiction or non-fiction, novels, essays or auto-fiction, a conspicuous number of recent titles have focused on questions of origin, belonging and identity. One of the most notable is Observations or a Barbarian by Asal Dardan, who grew up in an Iranian family in Germany. In telling her story, Dardan ignores genre conventions, combining forms of autobiography and philosophical essays. This flexibility allows her to simultaneously depict and analyze her life in between several worlds. “You are offered various places that are not whole but rather constructed of imagination and desire,” writes Dardan. “Place you want to stay, even if you’ve never been there.”


Jens Bisky works at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. He’s the editor of the magazine Mittelweg 36 and the sociological news platform Sociopolis. In 2019, he published his non-fictional Berlin: Biography of a Great City.

Translated by Jefferson Chase