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Another great book by Ernaux, "Mémoire de fille (Girl's Memory, Erinnerungen eines Mädchens) focuses on her youth and the weeks and months around her sexual awakening. It is a powerful book, tender, self-conscious (a tricky balance act in which Ernaux proves her prowess), delicate.

I liked once more how Ernaux weaves the personal with the general and the timely. Her story describes a particular experience that is human, at the same time strongly influenced by her time, upbringing, milieu. Understanding these influences, taking a stance towards them, accepting that they can never be fully overcome seems to be a core theme in her work, and they are once more carefully carved out here.

Another core issue are the topics of female sexuality, desire, and shame - as a social expectation and personal possibility. Her book has a strong feminist message without being abstract or normative. This makes it all the stronger, as her own struggles, wishes, and desires shine through clearly nonetheless and it is hard not to emphasize with a young girl who wanted nothing but to embrace fully the few years of her youth.

In its matter-of-fact approach to female desire, Mémoire de fille reminds me of Lars van Triers Nymphomania, albeit it is much lighter, more measured, less voyeuristic. Yet, the message is a same: why blame a women for something that is taken for granted for men? We are confronted with men infidelity and almost rape, and yet it is young Annie who faced ostracism by the group, who probably spent years of self-work to make sense of her desires, emotions, and acts.

Ernaux' book is a strong testament of our hard way to freedom from one another. Recommended!

Bertrand Russell is broadly considered a philosophical heavyweight, strengthened by the Nobel Prize for Literature he earned partly on behest of this work. With his strong roots in mathematics and logic as well as his outspoken political stance, Russell can be considered one of the great 20th century polymaths. As such, his History was often criticized on its academic merits and praised on its character, wit, and reach. Indeed, it is these qualities on which the work still stands strong.

Russell never claimed it a work of cultural history, taken his subjectivity on the issue for granted. As such, it is a historic document that can stand for itself, other than the ups and downs of academic discourse that often fade in relevancy as quickly as they rose. The book breathes the humble self-confidence of a kind of well-read great thinker that are getting more rare in current times - a quality that makes the book entertaining and pleasantly (and for the contemporary critic, dangerously) self-sufficient.

It is a big book, that nonetheless almost never felt heavy or overwhelming. Russell's cleverness and wit make it vivid and often even entertaining - and a great performance by Jonathan Keeble even a worthwhile audio experience.

It was a quite impactful, revelatory book for me in the last year and I will just be able to scratch the surface here. The book addresses global trade imbalances (especially China‘s and Germany‘s trade surpluses, think "Exportweltmeister"), arguing that they weaken overall global prosperity. This critique is not new and in the past I have often put it aside as simple envy. (Klein and Pettis too are Americans.) Yet, it is their detailed analysis of German economy that really made me think me. Klein and Pettis argue that Germany’s export strength is basically a compensation for a weak internal economy due to high inequality, a policy set up that favors capital over labor, historic reasons around the Euro, and the way profits are not distributed within German society. The book is very critical about common myths of "Made in Germany", German engineering ingenuity, and general narratives of cultural or moral superiority. These stories ignore how much of the competitive advantage can be explained by currency devaluation (in G’s case via the Euro) and hidden subsidies through wage suppression. What's worse, these story feed into nationalist tendencies while making positive change more difficult! (The same is even more true for China.)

I’m generally careful with strong shifts in how I see the world and it is important to not deduce conspiratorial intentions from broad systemic trends. This book is not about people or groups of people. Yet, it is a great, important, and certainly not wrong account of smoldering societal problems that interestingly run contra current trend lines of right vs. left, alt-right vs. woke, whatever. I am always happy about any explanation that doesn’t fall back to „the other side is wrong“. Surface conflicts like these have often hidden structural tensions that need to be addressed when you want to make progress in solving them. (That's the systemic coach in me speaking!)

A simple example how the book shifted my thinking is on the broad narrative around „Fachkräftemangel“. Why does this not seem to be a problem when building new car factories abroad (as happened much more than in Germany in the last 20 years)? Why is this a problem given that Germany is so proud of its dual education system? (It’s definitely not lack of migration, Germany has one of the highest share of immigrants globally!) More generally: why is it a problem at all given that companies "paying more" (and be it for education) should just lead to more people educating themselves in certain ways? It's the job "market" after all! This seems to be just another weird way how the proponents of boundary-less capitalism somehow seem to completely lack trust in the basic idea of supply and demand… "how weird indeed".

Ai Weiwei is a fascinating character. As an artist and activist, patriotic Chinese and critic of the CCP, a dissident and self-proclaimed hooligan he does not easily fit into existing stereotypes of artists. A classical loner painting water lilies in his garden, an industrial manager conducting his minions to draw dots, a postmodern concept-thinker philosophizing about bananas on walls - Ai is none of that.

It is exactly this complexity that makes "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows" so fascinating. Ai starts with the story of his father - a poet and intellectual who lived and suffered through the Cultural Revolution - before turning to his own life. Studying arts in the US, he was not in China when many of his fellow students fought and died for a free China on Tiananmen Square in 1989. After coming back to China, he found a voice in the emerging micro-blogging scene, received official acclaim by supporting the design of the "Bird's Nest" prior to the 2008 Olympics, before shifting to civic activism. The book focuses on the crucial years leading to his arrest in 2011, when he left China, throwing a light on what it means to stand in for courage and responsibility in a country that becomes ever more authoritarian.

The book is very well complemented by the grandiose documentary "Never Sorry" by the American directress Alison Klayman. Head over to my homepage for a review: bensahlmueller.com/ai-weiwei-never-sorry!