Dear Publishers and Friends,

when will this pandemic finally be history? This question surely is as much on your minds as on ours. How did mankind survive pandemics in history? That’s a question we have some answers for.

In his new book The Power of Epidemic, Volker Reinhardt reviews how the Great Plague from 1347 to 1353 changed the World. In Milan, the ruler Luchino Visconti had the city completely isolated, when the plague loomed. Sick people were walled in. Thus, Milan became the only city in Italy to be spared.
Volker Reinhardt shows how the supposed European conflagration was a sum of local dramas, which people coped with in very different ways: through political upheavals, persecution of minorities, restoration of old conditions or even praise of the tyrannis, as in Milan.

An already evident fact is that the pandemic has propelled us much further into the digital age, with its negative side effects. Completely new forms of corporate power have emerged, as the internationally renowned thinker Joseph Vogl reconstructs in his brilliant analysis of Capital and Resentment. The fusion of the financial economy with modern communication technologies establishes a new platform capitalism, at the expense of democracy and the common good.
Joseph Vogl is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Berlin and Permanent Visiting Professor at Princeton University.

Just after the last large pandemic, 100 years ago, Joseph Beuys was born, an artist of world fame who has been discredited as a “charlatan” while shaping and polarising contemporary art like hardly anyone else. In his groundbreaking biography, Philipp Ursprung impressively succeeds in locating Beuys' works in the social, economic and political context of his times.

In Damned and Destroyed, the internationally renowned archaeologist and prehistorian Hermann Parzinger gives a vivid account of cultural destruction from the Ancient Orient to the Present Day, showing that the deliberate devastation and plundering of cultural assets has always been mainly an expression of a new claim to power.

In new fiction, bestselling author Hans Pleschinski with his new novel introduces us to Paul Heyse, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1910, and contemporary Germany at the same time. He combines a sharp-tonguedly and comical story based on Heyse's life and work, his fame and transience in a deteriorating world, with a close look at the present.

Little Freedom is the title of the debut novel in our spring list, and we’re happy to report that it has already received great reviews. With a touching father-daughter story, Nicola Kabel puts her finger in both emotional and political wounds inflicted by the past and present.

Reading Jochen Schmidt is always pure pleasure – his new book is called I remember when King Kong died and our favourite part is where he, the GDR child, idealises in his typically funny way a “Western childhood”.

Finally, great news from our backlist: Jonas Lüscher’s novel Kraft was just published in the US by FSG, with praise from the Washington Post and The New York Times, amongst others.

Susanne Simor
Foreign Rights Manager Non-Fiction and Fiction

Phone: 49 (0) 89 381 89 228
Fax: 49 (0) 89 381 89 624
E-Mail

Jenny Royston
Foreign Rights Fiction

For Fiction titles: Italian and Hungarian Translation Rights please contact: Susanne Simor
For all other Translation Rights in the fiction list please contact:

Phone: 49 (0) 89 38189-335
Fax: 49 (0) 89 381 89 587
E-Mail

Jonathan Beck
Publisher

Address
Verlag C.H.BECK
Wilhelmstrasse 9
D – 80801 München