Literatur des Kalten Kriegs

Books About the Cold War
Von Daniel Johnson (The Wall Street Journal)
Buchautor Daniel Johnson (White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard – Houghton Mifflin, 2008 ) empfiehlt fünf Bücher als essentielle Lektüre zum besseren Verständnis der „Kultur des Kalten Kriegs“, darunter auch Literaturklassiker wie George Orwells 1984 und Mikhail Bulgakows Der Meister und Margarita.

Zitat:
In many respects, Mikhail Bulgakov’s „The Master and Margarita“ is a Cold War book, even though it was written between 1928 and the author’s death in 1940. The novel was not published until 1966-67 in the Russian journal Moskva (Moscow), and even then the editors cut about 60 pages, which soon enough made their way into samizdat publications. This scathing satire on every aspect of life under Stalin immediately caused a sensation.

Rushdie und die Fatwa

Twenty Years on: internalising the fatwa
von Kenan Malik (Link: Spiked)
Zwanzig Jahre nach der Veröffentlichung des Romans Die Satanischen Verse von Salman Rushdie und der durch Ayatollah Khomeini ausgesprochenen Fatwa, die im Westen zu einer ersten hitzig geführten Debatte über den „Clash der Zivilisationen“ gesorgt hat, ist heute die Angst vor Publikationen, die die islamische Welt provozieren könnten, größer denn je, so Kenan Malik, Autor des 2009 erscheinenden Buches From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (Atlantic Books).

Zitat
In 1989 even the Ayatollah’s death sentence could not stop the publication of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was forced into hiding for almost a decade. Translators and publishers were killed, bookshops bombed and Penguin staff forced to wear bomb-proof vests. Yet Penguin never wavered in its commitment to keep it published. Today, all it takes for a publisher to run for cover is a letter from an outraged academic. In the 20 years between the publication of The Satanic Verses and the withdrawal of The Jewel of Medina, the fatwa has in effect become internalised.