The German Issue

Walter Abish, Jean Baudrillard, Joseph Beuys, Maurice Blanchot, William S. Burroughs,Christo, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Michel Foucault, André Gorz, Martin Heidegger, Alexander Kluge, Ulrilke Meinhof, Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Helke Sander, Paul Virilio, Christa Wolf
The German Issue

The German Issue is the Tale of Two Cities, then, with each city separated from its own country by an invisible wall of suspicion or even hatred. It is also the complex evocation of the rebelling youth—squatters, punks, artists and radicals, theorists and ex-terrorists—who gathered all their energy and creativity in order to outlive a hostile environment.

Like a time capsule, The German Issue brings together all the major “issues” that were being debated on both sides of the Atlantic—which eventually found their abrupt resolution in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It involved the most important voices of the period—from writers and filmmakers to anthropologists, activists and poets, terrorists and philosophers.

The book opens with Christo’s “Wrapping Up of Germany” and the celebrated dialogue between East German dramaturge Heiner Müller and Sylvère Lotringer on the Wall (“Mauer”). Since it has been published in many languages, The German Issue offers a first-hand account of the Western world on the threshold of a major global mutation.