Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. A New History of German Literature actually delivers far more than its title suggests. It consists of some 200 ...

My passion for modern German history emerged out of my childhood. Reared in Boston and Los Angeles in the 1970s, I grew up barely one generation removed from the Holocaust, and I met many Germans who ...

How is it that the culture of German-speaking Europe has so profoundly influenced and shaped Western civilization—and especially the culture of the United States—through the centuries and into today?

At the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Katarina Witt, the figure skater once dubbed “the most beautiful face of socialism,” took to the ice to perform a routine set to Bizet’s opera Carmen.