Being merciful – what role does this term play in our society today? Or does it no longer play a role at all? In four short essays, Dimitré Dinev investigates this subject. He tells of personal experiences, of beggar-children who were hauled off to the West to serve Capitalism, of a country where people speak of security instead of freedom… Dimitré Dinev illustrates a society that cannot be merciful and confronts it with a person who is willing to take on responsibility. He pointedly beds this responsibility in parable-like stories, questions and striking subjects. “Barmherzigkeit” is the first of the series “Unruhe bewahren”, which was developed in cooperation with the Akademie Graz.

The whole world is buzzing and tweeting, in one way or the other, and this is what this book is about. Franz Schuh, a masterful essayist, looks deeper into the existence of boozers and their veering between the utopia of autonomy and the reality of dependency, proofing that suffering and depravation have a great say in who or what humans are. And if Twitter really played a crucial role in the Arab Spring uprisings, there must be more to it than empty tweeting, right? asks Kathrin Passig. And finally, the question on the links between poetry and birds’ twittering is answered by a double expert: Helwig Brunner is both one of the most important young poets in the German-speaking world and a keen ornithologist.

Wo sind die Grenzen der Sprache und was liegt dahinter? Der Horizont war vielleicht immer schon die größte Versuchung der Künste. Anna Mitgutsch beschreibt die Versuche der Dichter, über den Rand des Denkbaren hinaus zu gelangen. Sie spannt dabei einen großen historischen Bogen von Gilgamesch bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, dem die Idee des Horizonts zwar abhanden gekommen ist – nicht aber die Sehnsucht danach. Von Emily Dickinson über Jorge Luis Borges zu Imre Kertész eröffnen sich spannende Grenzgänge und machen Lust auf neue Entdeckungsreisen in die Literatur. Anna Mitgutsch weckt mit ihrem brillanten Essay die Neugierde auf eine Welt, die Rätsel bleibt. Absolut empfehlenswert!

Someone who neither consumes nor produces is redundant - according to the cutthroat logics of late capitalism. International elites claim that overpopulation is our greatest problem. If the population needs to be reduced, who will have to disappear asks Trojanow in his humanist essay that argues against the redundancy of humankind. In his forceful analysis he covers points such as devastation caused by climate change, ruthless neo-liberal politics on the labor market and the apocalypses presented in mass media that we, the seeming winners, fervently consume. One thing we have failed to realize is that these issues also concern us. They concern everyone and everything.

The official victims of the 20th century are commemorated in memorials. But how do we remember the thousands of nameless, secretly buried victims – Jews, Roma, anti-communists or partisans? How do we in Central Europe live in landscapes tainted by innumerable hushed up massacres: from Rechnitz in Burgenland to Kocevski Rog in Slovenia and Kurapaty near Minsk? Martin Pollack relentlessly, yet diligently draws a new, more honest map of our continent. It is a map in which memory and honest location replace shameful secrets and anonymous graves.