Michael Hofmann

Curable or Not?

The late Swiss writer Markus Werner’s bleakly funny The Frog in the Throat, first published forty years ago, is a parallel portrait of father-and-son misanthropes and seems to speak directly to our moment.

Words Without Consequences

“How can one not see through something so threadbare, so self-serving, so randomly and contemptuously thrown out by the self-adoring crooner?”

The Return of Trump—I

On losers, fear, the Supreme Court, the end of the FDR era, antisystemic times, and words without consequences. 

Order 1, Chaos 0

Football is a crazed bid for compensation, for escape, for some transcendent atavistic loyalty.

Punning for Germany

The strange experience of youth in Thomas Brussig’s East Germany.

Bewitched by Goethe

In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.

Found Poem

In the Pencil Zone

Susan Bernofsky’s biography of Robert Walser approaches her subject with an openness to other, previously rejected possibilities.

Heine’s Heartmobile

The liveliness and invention of Heinrich Heine’s writing changed the nature of German literature and of the whole nineteenth century.

Musil’s Infinities

The Resident

a poem

Art for Film’s Sake

‘A Born Contrarian’

For the subversive, modest, trenchant Bertolt Brecht, a poem is simply the most stringent and economical mode of presenting an argument.

Auden

a poem

The Lion in Winter

‘An Adorable Bookling’

A Puzzling Heroine of German Literature

‘The Kraus Project’

Torch Song in Vienna

Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Kraus Project’

Joseph Roth: Going Over the Edge