Review of Friedrich Kroenke’s Spinnentempel

DrThe ’68 revolution – if it was one – has unleashed a torrent of texts in which actors and sympathizers interpret the meaning and nonsense of the youthful protests that turned the Western world upside down, in the spirit of William Wordsworth’s poetry: “Bliss was that” in that dawn to be alive / And to be young was so heaven”—to see that dawn was a blessing and to be young was heaven! The storming of the Bastille was celebrated by the poet with great enthusiasm before the euphoria turned into depression. Even after 1968, the tsunami turned into a dirty storm: Gerd Koenen and others showed that revolution Student culture was anti-democratic and contained the germs of fascism – evidenced by the RAF rampage and Horst Mahler’s transformation into a neo-Nazi.

There are two types of writers: those who say a lot with few words, and those who bombard readers with little or nothing to say. Friedrich Kroenke belongs in the first category: he writes taciturn books that make living environments visible, succinctly and succinctly, which logarithmic authors would need hundreds of pages to describe.