hannah wickes

Tall, long limbed producer & tv lover. Book collector & live gig junkie. Feminist.

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I believe that everyone ought, in duty to do any good they can.

Thomas Coram

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LRB · Wolfgang Streeck · Playing Catch Up: The German Exception

How could Germany of all countries have become a paragon, politically stable and economically successful, of democratic capitalism in the 1970s – ‘Modell Deutschland’ – and later, in the 2000s, Europe’s uncontested economic and political superpower? Any explanation must have recourse to a . . .

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sophiaamoruso: Here we go! @girlbosstv @netflix @brittlrobertson

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More than a little excited for the arrival of this in April. The trailer looks like its going to be bingeworthy.

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You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We've lived together now for 58 years and I love you more than ever. I once more feel a gnawing emptiness in the hollow of my chest that is only filled when your body is pressed next to mine.

André Gorz

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“If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.“ 

 The Bell Jar-Sylvia Plath

[days-of-reading]

Libraries, archives, and museums all find themselves at the intersection of materiality and the mystical. Perhaps this is why we’re so quiet when we enter them.

Jenn Shapland, “Finders Keepers” in Tin House  (via m-abridged)

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*dances*

#NowPlaying Priestess (Shura Remix) by Pumarosa

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All of my favs! These songs were the musical highlights of the past year. #hottest100 And if you haven't voted get to it asap, you have less than 4 hours left!

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Current view 👌 (at Kushi Tei of Tokyo Düsseldorf)

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New favourite, Royal Jelly by Deap Vally

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I'm perennially interested in the past and the way that the past is different from the present. I'm interested in trying to do justice to that difference. I'm interested in trying to capture it and bring it alive for a reader.

Sarah Waters

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And it is perhaps in its failure to engage with European literatures that the English culture, for all the advantages of the global reach of the English language, shows itself at its most provincial.

Martin Chalmers, The Guardian

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News time! I am moving to Düsseldorf in Germany. Which means I really need to increase my understanding of German literature..... my knowledge is horribly and embarrassingly limited (and due to not speaking or reading Deutsche I am currently limited to translations). 

But yesterday, on the train I finished After Midnight by Irmgard Keun. And it was incredible, a satire of what life was like in Frankfurt in 1936. The narrator, Sanna is naively, and almost unknowingly critical of Nazi germany and reels off statements like this: 

“Goodness knows how often I’ve told her, “Gerti, don’t make yourself and Dieter unhappy.” Dieter is what they call a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class—I can never get the hang of these labels. But anyway, Gerti’s not supposed to have anything to do with him because of the race laws. If all Gerti does is simply sit in the corner of a café with Dieter, holding hands, they can get punished severely for offending against national feeling... And then the pair of them sit in a bar looking at each other, the air around them positively quivering with love-sickness. Everyone in the bar must notice; no good can come of it. They just live for the moment, and cause the air to quiver, and don’t stop to wonder what next. Gerti thinks the good Lord will help them, because she’s so beautiful, and the good Lord is a man.”

It is a genius book, short and sharp, and a true insight until what life was like in pre-war Germany. Keun wrote the book in exile after her books were banned and burnt. She seems to be an incredible woman, who sued the Gestapo for loss of her books and was in turn divorced by her husband for being non-conformist. 

And I just found this, an interview with Irmgard Keun’s daughter, Martina Keun-Geburtig, about what her mother was really like - and what she thought of her own work.