Language is more than just phonetics, it is information. The literary scholar Lydia H. Lui describes how, after World War II, different scientific disciplines – from cybernetics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis to molecular biology – participated in the inscription of alphabetic written language into digital information processes, thus creating a new species, the “Freudian Robot”. To article...

Sometimes words do what they want, and no one knows this better than Herta Müller. For decades the Nobel Laureate for Literature has explored the recalcitrance and permeability of language. In the coming edition of the talk series Dictionary of Now, together with the writer Marcel Beyer, she discusses when language becomes an expression of resistance and when an instrument of the exercise of power. On this occasion, we reproduce here a text from an anthology of the literary magazine Akzente. To article...

Where does tolerance and Laissez-faire end? When do silence and omissions become violence? The writer Jessica Lauren Elizabeth Taylor summarizes positions by writer Taiye Selasi, cultural theorist Theo Goldberg and historian Achille Mbembe and sketches a range of social phenomena against the background of an increased potential for violence. To article...

Recording in Progress!  is a sound installation by Julia Tieke that translates German-language media reports on migration and flight into the languages spoken by the people being reported on. It confronts the audience with the situation of not understanding on the one hand, but on the other, it also presents German-language commentary by the translators and speakers about the political background of misunderstanding language. The radio moderator and author Julia Tieke talks to Elisabeth Wellershaus in an interview about discoveries, pitfalls and newly created words in the complex field of translation. To article...