The German Mind

Goethe suffers young and seals a Faustian bargain. Schopenhauer says the will is everything and wishes it weren't. Nietzsche dances on the ruins of every certainty. Rilke tells the young to be patient. Kafka turns bureaucracy into nightmare. Mann builds a sanatorium for European ideas and watches them die. Hesse walks between wolf and man. Remarque writes the war that ended a civilisation. Doblin puts Berlin in a kaleidoscope. Celan writes poetry after the thing that was supposed to make poetry impossible. Grass drums through German guilt. Sebald walks through memory and finds only ruins.