Harald Schmidt vs. Helene Hegemann, Rüther vs. Airen

I've never cared for Harald Schmidt. He's a talkshow guy not unlike a German Jonathan Ross, only he was never remotely attractive. I find him verging on the racist and well into smug territory - and he makes jokes I don't understand about football. But last night I sat through his show to catch Helene Hegemann's appearance, hoping for a little insight into the whole Axolotl Roadkill collage/sampling/plagiarism issue.

More fool me. What we got was Harald and Helene chatting about their good buddy "René" - presumably Pollesch - and how Helene has lost all faith in the media. And although the whole world has been mouthing off about how she can't possibly have been to techno club Berghain at her age, she explained the phenomenon adequately enough for the old fogies in front of their TV sets.

A brief aside: Since when have underage girls not been able to get into clubs? Bouncers aren't actually there to keep pretty girls out. Their job is stopping large groups of unattractive men and other uncool undesirables from getting in. Not that I've been anywhere with a bouncer in the past ten years, but I'm guessing this hasn't changed since my day.

I digress. Basically Schmidt kidded around a bit with Hegemann but skirted the issue everyone's talking about. At one point she couldn't remember a particular passage he referred to, and commented, "It's probably not by me, that's why." Sweet. Schmidt left that comment hanging like a worm on a hook and changed the subject to talk about her hair. There's nothing like taking the yoof seriously, eh?

Luckily, we have Tobias Rüther, my favourite intellectual heavyweight. He managed to get an interview with the "damaged party", blogger Airen, which is coupled with a decent list of the bits Hegemann lifted from his book. There are quite a number of them, although few of them are word for word and if you ask me, Hegemann has improved on his prose. Airen talks about authenticity in a rather pathos-laden manner and tells us he thinks Hegemann's book is cool.

Meanwhile, the chattering classes are fixating on her nomination for the Leipzig prize. She's not going to win, they say, and the jury couldn't back out on its choice. But chairwoman Verena Auffermann told Deutschlandradio Kultur they'd discussed the matter at length and taken a majority decision - and went on to defend the book for a lot of good reasons.

Otherwise, the discussion seems to have split into two camps: people who've read the book and can now appreciate it for what it is, a work of imagination drawing on other people's experiences at points; and people who haven't read the book and think it's all appalling. Now that Hegemann's apologised we've entered the reflective stage: what have the big bad media done to the poor wee lass, first hyping her like there was no tomorrow and then cussing her for providing them with all-too-easy opportunities for puff pieces. Nicholas Kulish sums it up nicely in the New York Times, in fact.

What's getting lost is the book. I'm more than relieved it was still nominated - because that gives me official sanction not to eat my words.

Axolotl Roadkill, people, is good.

City-Lit: Tobias Rüther, Helden

As I’ve mentioned before, I nobly sacrificed my time earlier this summer to read through piles and piles of books about Berlin for the forthcoming City-Lit Berlin anthology, from the lovely people at Oxygen Books. And what a joy that was! Now that the dust has settled and the presses are whirring I thought I’d share some of the titles that made it in – and perhaps a few that got away.

These will only be brief pieces, as it’s been a while since I read the books in question, and some of them I only skimmed for juicy snippets. I’ll start off with what I found the most remarkable book in our collection: Tobias Rüther’s Helden. David Bowie und Berlin.

We’d been looking for pieces on famous Berliners and David Bowie just had to be in there, being very much part of the West Berlin legend. But pop biographies can be rather, well, specialised, which can be a tad, well, dull. So I was delighted to discover Tobias Rüther’s book on Bowie’s Berlin years.

The author is a journalist for the heavyweight Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, so it need come as no surprise that Helden is marvellously intellectual. Rüther treats us to discourses on Berlin’s architecture, contemplations on the nature of Bowie’s fleeting fixation on Nazism, comparisons to the Brücke art movement, and much more. The book investigates how the man himself imagined Berlin would be before he arrived, based on his fascination with Isherwood and all things thirties. And it looks at his life once he was here – two very different kettles of fish, no matter how hard Bowie tried.

Of course Rüther has done his research. There’s a four-page bibliography, he’s interviewed people who worked with Bowie in Berlin, visited his old flat and his old studios, and so on. But he puts it all together to conjure up a truly tangible West Berlin in the late seventies – although he’s only as old as I am so he can’t have experienced it first-hand. And above all, the man knows his music but never drifts into NME-style pop nerdism.

Most important from the practical point of view was that Tobias Rüther is the translator’s dream of a writer. A quick email enquiring about the sources of some of the text’s many quotes was answered in split seconds. Rüther went above and beyond the call of authorly duty to dig out all his sources for my translation, even faxing me a copy of a CD booklet. Twice.

Publishers: Work with this man. Buy the translation rights to this book. Satisfy the hungry minds of Britain’s and America’s intellectual music fans. You can be Heroes.