Welcome! Newsletter 20.
I realized that I sold myself short in last month’s newsletter. I am so focused on sports that I forgot the junge Welt articles from June that weren’t about sports. Since I’m the most pedantic of people when it comes to comprehensiveness, I need to list them now. So, I wrote about raising kids as a left-wing parent (not that I know anything about it, but that’s pretty much what the article says), Denmark joining the EU’s military defense policy, and the heinous attack on Pride festivities in Oslo.
July began with a trip to the north of Norway, visiting the island of Karlsøya that hosts an eco-socialist community (check out Karlsøyfestivalen) and the Sámi Riddu Riđđu Festival. I camped, hitchhiked, met great people, and imagined to be thirty years younger. There’s a report from the festival in junge Welt. I also wrote about Eatnameamet for junge Welt, the latest documentary by the Sámi filmmaker Suvi West.
My junge Welt sports articles in July were about scrabble, the Stockholm football supporter scene, and the EuroGames in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Also related to sports was my contribution to the first volume of Left Cultures magazine. Asked for a “cultural moment” that informed my political biography, I wrote an “Ode to Volker Ippig”, recalling the former FC St. Pauli goalkeeper’s legendary 1988 appearance in Germany’s “Aktuelle Sportstudio”.
A translation of mine was published in Kampfgeister, the new bulletin of Bremen’s Institut für Syndikalismusforschung: a fascinating autobiographical account by the Jewish anarchist Michel Stanger, who deserted from the Romanian army in his youth, rode to Berlin on the axles of a train car, and ended up in Sweden, where he summed up his experiences in an article for Frihetlig Socialistisk Tidskrift in 1978.
I was invited to talk about my earliest books by people with a grasp on modern media. Twice within a couple of weeks, which is odd, since I hardly ever get to talk about poststructuralism and the like. But it was fun. There’s a video recording for Josef Mühlbauer’s VIPR series, and an audio recording for Jan Groos’s Future Histories podcast.
Finally, Norbert Hinrichs of Syndikat-A took issue with some of the things I wrote in the article “Warum Anarchokommunismus?”. Cheeky, but hey, Norbert is a splendid fellow, and if you read German and are interested in the most internal of anarchist debates (I see the potential readership of this growing exponentially!), you should definitely have a look at his column.
More traveling in August. Stay safe!