Innholdsfortegnelse for April 10, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 8–May 11, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Alison Hokanson and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, with essays by Joseph Leo Koerner and Cordula Grewe. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 295 pp., $50.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age an exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, December 15, 2023–April 1, 2024. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Markus Bertsch and Johannes Grave. London: Thames and Hudson, 509 pp., $65.00 (distributed in the US by Norton) The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time by Florian Illies, translated from the German by Tony Crawford. Polity, 186 pp., $25.00 He never signed a canvas, but he had…

The Kingdom a television series directed by Lars von Trier The first two seasons of the Danish director Lars von Trier’s TV series The Kingdom, which aired in the 1990s, committed extravagant damage to the genre of hospital drama. Even then von Trier’s name was routinely, brutally coupled with the term provocateur, and his first provocation in The Kingdom was to make a soap opera about a hospital where the doctors weren’t good-looking or vibrating with noble sentiment but were generally corrupt or insane. The most rational people in it were a comical duo: Mrs. Drusse, a spiritualist old lady who manages to infiltrate herself into the neurological ward with an imaginary illness, and her son, Bulder, an alcoholic hospital porter in his fifties. It was set in Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet—a…

A Question of Belonging by Hebe Uhart, translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner, with an introduction by Mariana Enríquez. Archipelago, 217 pp., $22.00 (paper) How far away do you have to go to call it travel? The Argentine writer Hebe Uhart, who died in 2018 at the age of eighty-one, had a long career as a short story writer and then turned to travel writing in earnest in the last decade of her life. She went on plenty of trips to other Latin American countries, but mostly she liked to stay close to home. In A Question of Belonging, a selection of her crónicas (literary journalism in its Latin American incarnation), she finds much to interest her in Argentine towns, cities, suburbs, and her own Buenos Aires neighborhood. As…

A year and a half ago I arrived in China after a long Covid-induced absence and reached my hotel in a big centralwestern city in the early evening, seriously disoriented by the long flights from the US and the drastic change in time zones. I was hungry, but to my dismay I discovered that the restaurant in the hotel did not serve dinner, and I had no money in my account in the Chinese phone app WeChat. Without electronic cash I couldn’t order food, so I would have to wander out and search groggily for a place to eat that would accept paper money. Eager to avoid this, I asked a friend if she could help me find a good delivery meal and order it for me—I’d pay her back…

Shattered by Hanif Kureishi. Ecco, 328 pp., $28.00 Hanif Kureishi, the English playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, posted these words on his Substack in January 2023: On Boxing Day, in Rome, after taking a comfortable walk to the Piazza del Popolo, followed by a stroll through the Villa Borghese, and then back to the apartment, I had a fall. I had been following Kureishi’s Substack for a while out of admiration, curiosity, and loyalty—though I’d met him only once, briefly. (His partner, Isabella D’Amico, and her family are old friends.) His dispatches were warm and entertaining, often about the writer’s life. But this one was shocking: I cannot move my arms and legs. I cannot scratch my nose, make a phone call or feed myself. As you can imagine, this is…

Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism by Magda Teter. Princeton University Press, 389 pp., $35.00; $24.95 (paper) At the heart of Christian historical understanding was the idea of supersession. The idea was this: the new faith would replace Judaism, thus establishing its own superiority. This religious, political, and ethical concept was translated into legal and administrative procedures over the centuries, thereby shaping relations between Christians and Jews. Supersession has therefore been much discussed as the conceptual bedrock of anti-Judaism. Now Magda Teter’s Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism argues that supersession offered foundations for white supremacy, too. To make her case, Teter begins with the early believers who understood Christianity as a new dispensation, yet one whose roots were deep and whose…

After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany by Michael H. Kater. Yale University Press, 517 pp., $35.00 Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022 by Frank Trentmann. Knopf, 784 pp., $50.00 On February 23, Germany held a nationwide election. The results were disturbing, if not completely unexpected. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the conservative party that has served as a pillar of Germany’s democratic system for nearly eighty years, came in first with 28.5 percent of the vote, a relatively anemic result. Finishing second, with 20.8 percent, was the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a revisionist far-right party that rejects migrants and has been implicated in an attempt to overthrow the federal government. The Social Democrats (SPD), who have long been one of the country’s leading mainstream parties,…

Seven Social Movements That Changed America by Linda Gordon. Liveright, 515 pp., $39.99 The Friends of Universal Reform, about five hundred of them, trooped into Boston’s Chardon Street Chapel to debate the woman question, consider scriptural authority, and damn the institution of slavery. “A revolution of all Human affairs is now in progress,” Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, happily declared. That was in 1840. The Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife, Sophia Dana Ripley, were setting up a utopian community, Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. “He who joins,” the artist Sarah Freeman Clarke said, “does it upon the principle of co-operation in labor and a desire for social improvement.” Margaret Fuller was already holding a series of “Conversations” for Boston women in a preview of the feminist…