p8

WG Sebald was the last German author to make an international breakthrough. He grew up a few miles from the Austrian border, grew up in England, and considered himself a student of Peter Handke of the Grazer Gruppe.

Wenderoman authors Monika Muron and Uwe Tellkamp turned to The New Right. Later authors of the genre bucked the trend: Lutz Seiler, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Felix Stephan.

p9

The best West German art came from people who saw the Americans not as liberators but as those who ran a system that allowed the Nazis to integrate into the new government and elite: Gerhard Richter, Jörg Immendorf, Alexander Kluge.

p10

Walter Benjamin observed that across Europe there was once scarcely an interior where no one had died.

p17

Like Heiner Müller says, it is better to speak of people than the people.

p32

Eva Leitolf spent 20 years assembling the series Deutsche Bilder, photos of places where racist attacks have occurred.

p34

In Minima Moralia, Adorno wrote about getting on with cars whilst in exile in Los Angeles.

In 1964, he wrote to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to demand a crossing light be installed at the Institute for Social Research. It is known today at the Adornoampel.

p38

An Ausfallstraße is a road that connects the historic city center to the autobahn and periphery.

p46

(Nell Zink) I moved to Germany to get away from attractive men.

p50

One can regard fidelity as a neurosis. I have heard it called sexuelle Abhängigkeit.

p80

(Dische-Becker) It is almost as if there’s a monogamous relationship between Germany and Jews, and anyone else is an interloper.

p90

Germany is the arbiter in Europe when it comes to both antisemitism and migration. If Germany says it’s fine to drown people in the Mediterranean, then it’s fine to drown people in the Mediterranean because the people who are the most sorry for their past treatment of minorities and have learned the most from their abuse of racialised people say it’s fine. If Germanys says the people trying to get into Europe are a danger to Jews so it’s fine to deny them entry, then it’s fine to turn them away.

p146

Sholem Alecheim’s 1911 epistolary novel Marienbad

p172

Gethsemanekirchen in the 1990 Summer of Anarchy in Mitte and Prenzlauerberg.

p191

Hanno Klein, a power broker figure during the reconstruction of reunified West Berlin, looked down on Ossis, and was killed by a letter bomb. Case as yet unsolved.