Andreas Kluth's Blog

The folks at Shepherd, a book-discovery site, asked for my recommendations in a genre similar to that of Hannibal and Me. They let me choose only five, and I picked: Find out why I chose these five, and not the hundreds of others on my shelves over at Shepherd.

Page 220-221 in “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari: If you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, to explore dead ends, to make space for doubts and […]

The wisdom of Mr. Crotchety, known to all former and long-time readers of the Hannibal Blog:

Two weeks ago I stood before this beautiful door in the Uffizi, in Florence. Uffizi means “offices” because what is today the world’s greatest museum started as the offices built by the family that ran Florence, and sometimes Europe: the Medici. The upper panel on the door above shows the Medici’s crest, six “balls” (including […]

One day almost twenty years ago, I bounded out of The Economist’s modernistic “Plaza” in London’s St. James’s, skipped past a few of the street’s posh gentlemen’s clubs and ran into Green Park, where I let out a primal scream. Aged 27, I had just got a job offer from The Economist. A dream was coming true. Since […]

A year ago I kicked off a series of posts that I called “my Germany mix”. The idea was and is to highlight just a few of my many, many articles on Germany that might be a bit more timeless than usual in journalism. Last year’s post was about the Nazi past and the unique remembrance […]

Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdogan and Viktor Orban already are. Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and a long list of others really would like to be. What? Little Caesars. Because Caesarism sooner or later grows naturally out of populism. And that is a threat to our Western understanding of republican liberty. That, at least, was my hypothesis when I was invited […]

So I finally got around to Hitler. I took the expiry of the copyright of Mein Kampf as my excuse to reflect on how the Germans have over the past 70 years dealt with the shadow and legacy of the Führer. But that piece in our 2015 Christmas Issue is only the latest of several articles that […]

Wednesdays are our deadline days at The Economist. This means that correspondents have filed their copy to editors, who are subbing the pieces and going back and forth with correspondents and fact-checkers. Every now and then it gets hairy, but most of the time it just means lots of overeducated people sitting around doing the same […]

Tom Friedman was in Berlin this week, hosted by the American Academy, to make himself smart on Germany and to begin plugging the book he’s working on, “Thank you for being late”. Sipping drinks on a Charlottenburg rooftop before a dinner given for him, Tom and I were talking about one of the many ideas he […]