Happy new year! This blog is heading into its third year, not bad. I like doing the monthly round-ups, helps me to stay motivated.
It’s not going to be a lasting feature, but I’m doubling down on last month’s review doubleheader. In other words (possibly less confusing ones), we have two new reviews again this month: one, “Football Antifa”, on yet another antifa soccer title from Pitch Publishing, namely The Defiant: A History of Football Against Fascism by Chris Lee, and the other, “Ground Zero for Hardcore”, on Jim Ruland’s Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records.
Now, attentive readers will notice a new widget (I believe it’s called) on this blog: “Playlists“. One of the great things about running a blog is that you can publish things, even if no one else is interested in them. For example, something about music and films that have influenced you, which is what you’ll find if you do indeed care to click on the relevant links. As life comes to a halt during the holiday season, you’ll suddenly find time to compile things like these.
Sports writing for junge Welt: biathlon, alpine skiing, Nordic combined, ski mountaineering, ski jumping, power struggles within FIS (the International Skiing Federation), sports and Christmas, and interviews with the “Olympiaförderkreis” Oberwiesenthal, the WSV Oberhof 05, and (a long one) with Elisabeth Pähtz, the world’s fortieth woman claiming a chess grandmaster title. Non-sports writing for junge Welt: elections on the Faroe Islands, new Danish government.
I wrote two longer articles about Sápmi in German, one for the long-standing environmental journal Rabe Ralf, one for the Austrian magazine Tagebuch.
The South Tyrolean magazine Kulturelemente did an issue on anarchism, which contains my contribution “Anarchismus oder die Utopie eines herrschaftsfreien Lebens”.
My German translation of the Jewish anarchist Mechel Stanger‘s autobiographical account about escaping first Romania and then Germany to settle in Sweden has been reprinted in the book Fragmente zu Anarchismus und Anarcho-Syndikalismus in der Bukowina, edited by Martin Veith. Meanwhile, the German version of my essay “Revolution Is More Than a Word: 23 Theses on Anarchism” has been reprinted in the latest issue of the anarchist magazine espero. I also found out, five years after the fact, that an English article I wrote with Klara Dolk about Stockholm’s alternative sports club 17 SK, which I co-founded in 2010, was reprinted in the Routledge book DIY Football.
Speaking of Sweden, we have a crisis in our union, the SAC. There’s much discussion on online forums, which I don’t partake in, but I wrote a little something under the title “För en öppen konfliktkultur” for the latest edition of our member’s magazine Syndikalisten.
There’ve been nice reviews of my English straight edge books, Sober Living for the Revolution and X: Straight Edge and Radical Sobriety on Thoughts Words Action.
2023. Can’t get much worse than 2022, but that’s what we said a year ago as well. Galgenhumor, one of German-speakers’ only virtues.
More next month. Stay safe!