Airlift from Berlin Review

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In diesem Gespräch vor Live-Publikum in Wien spricht Tobias Haberkorn mit Raphaela Edelbauer über die Longevity-Bewegung, die katholische Gebets-App Hallow und darüber, wie der Wunsch nach einem ewigen Leben im Diesseits zu einer Bedrohung für die Demokratie wird.

Raphaela Edelbauers Essay erscheint im Reader 7 der Berlin Review und auf blnreview.de.

Berlin Review ist eine unabhängige Zeitschrift, die auch über Ihre Leser:innen und Hörer:innen finanziert. Ein Abo gibt es unter blnreview.de/abo.

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Claudia Durastanti was born in Brooklyn in the eighties and grew up between the US and rural southern Italy. Her novel La Straniera was a finalist for the Premio Strega. The English translation Strangers I Know received a PEN award. She now lives in Rome, where she writes and translates, including the latest Italian edition of The Great Gatsby.

For Berlin Review, Claudia wrote about transfuge de classe narratives, the genre of literature where writers from poor backgrounds escape their circumstances and look back on their upbringings with a mix of shame, guilt and pride. You...

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Lauren Oyler talks with anthropologist Biao Xiang, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. His concepts of “suspension,” “involution,” and “the disappearance of the nearby” have gone mainstream with a whole generation of young people in China.

Lauren and Biao Xiang discuss how loneliness, a condition once considered a luxury problem for artists or philosophers, has now become widespread, reaching even those who are surrounded by others, like young people and members of the working class.

They also discuss the role of AI and neo-liberalism in loneliness, the loss of pride in the working...

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In this episode, Lauren and Tobias discuss a literary scandal in the English-speaking and what writers get wrong about AI.

Tobias recommends Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. Lauren recommends Empire of AI by Karen Hao, on the companies building these systems and what they are really after.

For more on culture in the age of AI, the current issue of Berlin Review includes "AI UGLIES," an essay by the writer and researcher Enis Maci on AI, image manipulation, and propaganda.

You can find it, along with all our reviews and episodes, at blnreview...

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Florian Meinel ist Professor für Staatstheorie und Vergleichendes Staatsrecht an der Universität Göttingen. Für Berlin Review hat er das Buch „Meinungsfreiheit" von Ronen Steinke besprochen.

In diesem Gespräch erklärt Meinel, wie das strafrechtliche Regime der Bundesrepublik aus dem Nachkriegskompromiss entstanden ist, was der Streit um „From the River to the Sea" über den Zustand der deutschen Demokratie verrät, und warum Rechtsunsicherheit Menschen mit unsicherem Aufenthaltsstatus zur Zwangsdepolitisierung zwingt.

Florains Essay „Meinungsfreiheit heute oder Vom Sinn der unklaren Rechtslage" ist auf blnreview.de zu lesen.

Die 7. Druckausgabe d...

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Novelist Maaza Mengiste joins Berlin Review for a live conversation at Chapters Bookshop in Berlin, recorded as part of her time in the city as a fellow at the American Academy.

Mengiste is the author of Beneath the Lion's Gaze and The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. In conversation with editor Meret Weber, she discusses the question that runs through all her work: how ordinary do decent people come to do indecent things?

They also talk about the role photography plays both in her writing process and in the...

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Two new films released this spring approach modern relationships from radically different angles. The Drama, directed by Kristoffer Borgli, is an American romantic comedy about a couple approaching their wedding when one partner reveals a secret that threatens to break them up. Allegro Pastel, directed by Anna Roller and adapted from Leif Randt’s bestselling 2020 novel, follows a Berlin couple in an open relationship who can neither fully commit to each other nor fully let go.

In this episode of Airlift, Lauren Oyler and Tobias Haberkorn discuss what these films reveal about intimacy, indecision, and the em...

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In September 2025, Palestinian writer Alaa Al-Qaisi was able to leave Gaza on a student visa. In January 2026 she arrived in Berlin for a residency in Wannsee, part of a program for writers in exile. At the end of the residency, a public reading was scheduled. It did not take place as planned. The event was cancelled and moved to a smaller, private venue, and the exile program that had invited her was defunded.

While this was happening, Alaa was writing a Berlin diary that absorbed the cancellation and the atmosphere around it. The essay became a...

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Tobias Haberkorn and Lauren Oyler discuss the scandal that has consumed the German media: comedian Christian Ulmen stands accused by his ex-wife, TV presenter Collien Fernandes, of stealing her identity, creating fake social media accounts, and engaging in sexually charged conversations with men in her name — what she calls digital sexual violence. They discuss what Ulmen's brand of misogynist humor reveals about German comedy culture, why the reckoning arrived later here than elsewhere, what the case says about the blurry line between autofiction and real life, and what Collien's defiant public response signals about how women are expected to...

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Tobias Haberkorn talks to Zoltán Ádám, a political economist based in Budapest, about the landslide defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary's 2026 parliamentary election. They discuss what it actually means to dismantle a system Orbán spent sixteen years building, whether Peter Magyar and his Tisza party have the tools and the will to restore liberal democracy, and what Hungary's experience reveals about the fragility of democratic institutions everywhere. They also talk about the international far right's investment in Orbán, the legal gray zone of the transition period, and what Zoltán — who lost his own unive...

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Lauren Oyler talks to Deborah Feldman, author of the memoir Unorthodox and longtime Berliner, about her essay "For the Love of Jews," published in the new issue of Berlin Review. They discuss German philo-Semitism, what Feldman calls a "fetishized compassion" for Jews, how she became a coveted fixture in the German media landscape, and what her experience reveals about the country's complicated relationship with Jewish identity. They also talk about Gaza, the German government's support for Israel, and whether Feldman plans to stay in Germany at all.

Read: Deborah Feldman's essay "For the Love of Jews"...

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Tobias Haberkorn spricht mit Deborah Feldman und Nora Haddada live vor Publikum auf der Leipziger Buchmesse über Minderheiten, Vergleiche und die Tücken der Solidarität. Noras Essay für die Berlin Review untersucht William Gardner Smiths Roman The Stone Face von 1963 — über einen schwarzen Amerikaner, der in Paris dem Rassismus zu entkommen glaubt, bis er sieht, wie die Algerier um ihn herum behandelt werden. Deborahs Essay For the Love of Jews handelt von ihren Jahren in Deutschland und der schleichenden Erkenntnis, nicht geschätzt, sondern konsumiert zu werden. Zusammen fragen sie: Was bedeutet es, wenn die Zuneigung einer Ge...

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Tobias Haberkorn and Lauren Oyler discuss Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, originally published in Italian in 2022 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025. The book, which follows a couple who moves to Berlin around 2010, after the Financial Crisis, has been called a defining millennial novel, praised on its literary merits, and also widely debated and intensely disliked. In this episode, Lauren and Tobias talk about why the novel is so polarizing, what it misses and whether the Berlin depicted even exists anymore.

Read: Lianna Mark's Better Living Through Self-Curation in Berlin Review: https://blnreview.de/en/ausgaben/2026-0...

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In the first episode of Airlift, a new show from Berlin Review, Tobias Haberkorn and Lauren Oyler discuss two films nominated for nine Academy Awards each: Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value and Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme. They explore what both films reveal about the widening cultural rift between the United States and Europe, family stories generational trauma, and the role of masculinity.

Read Clara Miranda Scherffig’s essay “Production Value” for Berlin Review: https://blnreview.de/en/ausgaben/2026-04/clara-miranda-scherffig-sentimental-value-joachim-trier

Subscribe to Berlin Review — essays, criticism, and fiction from around the world. From €5/month: https://blnreview...

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Damon Taleghani und Tobias Haberkorn über die iranische Diaspora in Deutschland und die Politik des Exils.

Seit Anfang 2026 dominiert der Iran die Nachrichten. Wie wirkt sich diese Situation auf die iranische Diaspora in Deutschland aus? Zu Gast ist Damon Taleghani, Musiker und Autor in Berlin. Er spricht mit Berlin Review Editor Tobias Haberkorn über seinen Essay „Tod dem Tod. Es lebe das Leben“, der zeigt, wie sich der Protestslogan „Tod dem Schah“ aus den 1970er Jahren unter den Anhängern des im Exil lebenden Schah-Sohns in sein Gegenteil verwandeln konnte.

Lesen Sie Damons Essay „Tod dem Tod...

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In this episode of Berlin Review Audio, writer Lianna Mark reads her essay "Better Living Through Self-Curation," originally published in the winter online edition of Berlin Review. The piece responds to Vincenzo Latronico’s widely discussed novel Perfection, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize after the publication of its English translation.

In her essay, Mark looks beyond the polarized reactions to the novel and examines the cultural economy behind authenticity. What does it mean to perform sincerity in a literary marketplace that rewards stories that are easily packaged and exported? And how does self-curation shape no...

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Yevgenias Essay _Vom Aushalten des Krieges _blickt auf Kiew im bald vierten Jahr des russischen Angriffskrieges und erzählt vom Leben unter Beschuss, von Zwangsmobilisierung und problematischen Dynamiken innerhalb der ukrainischen Gesellschaft.

Das Gespräch wurde im Dezember 2025 aufgezeichnet und ist Teil des Berlin Review Reader 5.

Finden Sie Yevgenias Essay auf blnreview.de

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One of the first essays published in Berlin Review was Logan February's "Sans Souci"

In this episode the Nigerian poet and essayist reads an excerpt from the piece, written while living in Berlin on a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. The essay begins with a walk through Sanssouci Park in Potsdam and continues into a meditation on exile, colonial inheritance, loneliness as a luxury and what it means to stand inside and outside a place at once.

After reading an excerpt of the essay, Logan is joined by the writer and translator Miriam Stoney for a...

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Samanta Schweblin is from Argentina and has been twice-nominated for the International Booker Prize and Brazilian poet and essayist Ricardo Domeneck, who was awarded the National Library Prize in Rio de Janeiro and the Premio Jabuti.

Their conversation looks at how their writing has changed since leaving their home countries, the role of satire in a strange world and why Berlin is still a worthwhile place to make a home as a writer.

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Lauren Oyler's triptych On Not Going Home, published in Berlin Review Reader 5, moves between late-night bars, missed connections, temporary attachments and the melancholy of staying awake too long.

In conversation with Berlin Review editor Tobias Haberkorn, Lauren reflects on why she turned to poetry, after years of writing prose and what it means to remain suspended between homes, relationships and other places.

This conversation was recorded in December before a live audience at the daadgalerie in Berlin.

You can read more of Lauren Oyler’s poetry in Review Reader 5 (http://blnreview.de/re...

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«‹Die kalten Nächte der Kindheit› von 1980 blickt zurück, in Form eines inneren Monologs über Kindheit, Krankheit, Sprache und Überleben, während ‹Suche nach den Spuren eines Selbstmordes› diese Bewegung nach außen verlagert, auf eine Reise durch Europa, ‹zu den Gräbern meiner Schriftsteller›, die zugleich eine Bewegung ins Innere ist. In beiden Werken wird die Schwelle zwischen Leben und Tod zum Gegenstand. Zusammen gelesen antwortet die eine Lektüre auf die Aporien der anderen» — das schreibt die Literaturwissenschaftlerin Esra Akkaya in unserem Reader 5 über die großartige türkische Schriftstellerin Tezer Özlü.

Warum Özlü gerade wiederentdeckt wird...

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“The license that Israel, the land of the victims, has long enjoyed and abused may be expiring. The sons and daughters of the next generation will be free to rethink their own lives and future, beyond the memory of the Holocaust; they will also have to pay for the sins of their parents and bear the burden of the genocide perpetrated in their name,” wrote the Israeli-American Holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov in April 2025, during the genocidal starvation campaign that Israel enacted against the Palestinian people in Gaza. In conversation with Berlin Review editor Tobias Haberkorn, Bartov disc...

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Bei Fragen, die mit Israel und Palästina zu tun haben, wandelt Deutschland stets am Rande des Nervenzusammenbruchs. Warum eigentlich? Auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse 2025 sprach Berlin-Review-Editor Tobias Haberkorn mit dem Politikwissenschaftler Daniel Marwecki und dem Herausgeber der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung Jürgen Kaube darüber, wie die Staatsräson das akademische und kulturelle Leben in Deutschland auf den Kopf gestellt hat.

Daniel Marwecki ist ein Experte für Geopolitik und die deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen (einen Auszug aus seinem neuen Buch «Die Welt nach dem Westen» gibt es auf blnreview.de). Jürgen Kaube besetzt als einer von vier Her...

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«Flood the zone with life» war das Motto des Dichters, Theatermachers und seriellen Review-Schreibers Kevin Killian, der von 2003 bis 2019 über 2.000 Produkt- und Buchbesprechungen auf Amazon veröffentlichte. Clemens J. Setz hat die von Semiotext(e) verlegte Auswahl Killians bester Amazontexte für Berlin Review besprochen.

Wir trafen Clemens in der Buchhandlung Analog in Wien zu einem Gespräch über Killians Werk, über die Entwicklung vom Kaufempfehlungsalgorithmus zur automatisierten Sprache, über den «AI Slop» und Edgar Allen Poes Raben «Nevermore».

Mit Lesepassagen aus Clemens J. Setz’ Text «Der beste Mensch von Amazon» und seiner Übersetzung zweier Amazonrezen...

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Capture, Treason and Solidarity—Writer Tash Aw joins Berlin Review publisher Tobias Haberkorn for a deeply personal and politically resonant conversation about migration, class mobility, family loyalty, and what it means to feel like a traitor simply for having changed.

Reading from his essay “Traitors,” published in Berlin Review Reader 4—Summer 2025, Aw reflects on growing up in Malaysia, the silence surrounding the 1969 pogrom, switching languages on public buses, the solitude of queer ambition, moving to the heart of the anglo-dominanted system of world literature—and the quiet distance that grows between those who leave and those who stay...

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Auch die Deutschen seien am 8. Mai 1945 vom Nationalsozialismus befreit worden, behauptete Bundespräsident Richard von Weizsäcker vor vierzig Jahren in einer epochemachenden Rede. Die so eingeleitete (west)deutsche Erinnerungskultur scheitert heute an der Realität. Wer wurde wirklich befreit im Frühjahr 1945, und wer harrt bis heute seiner Befreiung? Eine Gegenrede zu Ehren der «Displaced Persons» von damals und aller Geflüchteten von heute.

Autor: Erhard Schüttpelz Interpret: Hanns Zischler Schnitt: Astrid Menze Redaktion, Produktion: Tobias Haberkorn

Erschienen in Berlin Review No 11, Mai 2025 blnreview.de

© 2025 Berlin Review / Erhard Schüttpelz

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Capture, Treason and Solidarity — Teil 1 unseres Gesprächs am 30.11.2024 in der daadgalerie Berlin Kreuzberg. Mit Moshtari Hilal und Diedrich Diederichsen, moderiert von Emily Nill.

Im heutigen Diskurs sind alle gefangen: von einer eskalierenden Politik des Krieges und der Grausamkeit, von sich gegenseitig ausschließenden Vorstellungen von Trauma und Versöhnung, und von den eigenen Positionen, denn der einzige Weg nach vorne, so scheint es, ist das doubling down.

Im Dezember 2024 trafen wir uns in der daadgalerie in Berlin-Kreuzberg mit Moshtari Hilal, Diedrich Diederichsen und Tash Aw, um über «Capture, Treason and Solidarity» zu sprechen – über die Sch...

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«A boring, foreign city, and expensive to live in, too…»

Concerns about the end of Berlin might finally come true: the repressive turn that local politics recently took on solidarity movements with Palestine seems to confirm what sceptics always knew – Berlin as a place of freedom and artistic experimentation was at best a utopia for the few, never a reality for the many. Nevermind that Nabokov (or a friend quoted by Nabokov) called Berlin «a boring, foreign city, and expensive to live in, too» already in 1925.

And yet, something new seems to be emerging since last...

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«Which school of inflation do you belong to?» If the question sounds odd to people in Europe, it will most likely trigger a flood of physical memories, trauma responses, and awkward anecdotes when posed to writers from Latin America. On the occasion of Alan Pauls’ essay for the first issue of Berlin Review, we’ve invited the Argentinian author and his Mexican colleague Cristina Rivera Garza to talk about inflation and its various specters. Join us for a conversation about the difficult, but essential task of writing on money, inflation as lebensform and structure of feeling, and the danger...

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In ihrem Berlin-Review-Essay «Kein Ende des Krieges» erzählt Yevgenia Belorusets vom ukrainischen Leben unter Beschuss und Besatzung, von unbewältigtem Leid und radikaler Seelsorge, von Fatalismus und Alltagsgeschick. Wir sprechen mit Yevgenia über ihre Reise im Spätsommer 2023 nach Kyjiw, wo sie immer noch eine Wohnung hat, über die Gefahren zynischer Beobachtung, über Abgründe der Normalisierung und das Verständnis dafür, über Polarisierung und Verhärtungen der Fronten, auch und gerade der diskursiven. Wie groß ist die Gefahr, dass der Krieg zu einem «rechtmäßigen Zustand» wird und was kann das Schreiben dagegen tun?

Am 4.11.2023 spr...