signaleTRANSFER: German Thought in Translation

The Readability of the World represents Hans Blumenberg's first extended demonstration of the metaphorological method he pioneered in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. For Blumenberg, metaphors are symptomatic of patterns of thought and feeling that escape conceptual formulation but are nonetheless indispensable, because they allow humans to orient themselves in an otherwise overwhelming world. The Readability of the World applies this method to the idea that the world presents itself as a book. The metaphor of the book of nature has been central to Western interpretations of reality, and Blumenberg traces the evolution of this metaphor from ancient Greek cosmology to the model of the genetic code to access the different expectations of reality that it articulates, reflects, and projects. Writing with equal authority on literature and science, theology and philosophy, ancient metaphysics and twentieth-century biochemistry, Blumenberg advances rich and original interpretations of the thinking of a range of canonical figures, including Berkeley, Vico, Goethe, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bacon, Flaubert, and Freud. Through his interdisciplinary, anthropologically sharpened gaze, Blumenberg uncovers a wealth of new insights into the continuities and discontinuities across human history of the longing to contain all of nature, history, and reality in a book, from the Bible, the Talmud, and the Qur'an to Diderot's Encyclopedia and Humboldt's Cosmos to the ACGT of the DNA code.

St. Matthew Passion is Hans Blumenberg's sustained and devastating meditation on Jesus's anguished cry on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Why did this abandonment happen, what does it mean within the logic of the Gospels, how have believers and nonbelievers understood it, and how does it live on in art? With rare philological acuity and vast historical learning, Blumenberg unfolds context upon context in which this cry has reverberated, from early Christian apologetics and heretics to twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Blumenberg's guide through this unending story of divine abandonment is Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental Matthäuspassion, the parabolic mirror that bundled eighteen hundred years of reflection on the fate of the crucified and the only available medium that allows us post-Christian listeners to feel the anguish of those who witnessed the events of the Passion. With interspersed references to writers such as Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Freud, and Benjamin, Blumenberg gathers evidence to raise the singular question that, in his view, Christian theology has not been able to answer: How can an omnipotent God be so offended by his creatures that he must sacrifice and abandon his own Son?

Un/German is a powerful intervention in the ongoing debates over national identity, migration, and collective memory in Europe. Against the backdrop of the 2015 "refugee crisis," Fatima El-Tayeb argues that Europe's internal fractures were deflected through recurring crises, casting racialized populations as the external menace against which the continent could unite. First published in German in 2016, the book critically examines how Germany's reaction to the arrival of nearly one million refugees-initially framed as a "culture of welcome" but one that rapidly turned to hostility-was not an anomaly but part of a broader European pattern. Drawing on public memory and its material expressions in post–1989 Germany, Un/German brings into sharp relief the disparities in how Europe remembers its fascist, socialist, and colonial pasts. El-Tayeb highlights Black, Muslim, and Roma artists and activists who disrupted public commemorations intended to reinforce dominant narratives, arguing that these disturbances brought to the fore unresolved tensions in German collective memory. In doing so, El-Tayeb reveals the limits of Europe's self-conception as pluralistic and progressive, while also opening the door to new, more inclusive ways of imagining European identity.