MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Poetic dream that ended in nightmare
CALUM BARNES recommends an account of the tragic end of the brief period when writers took power in 1918 Bavaria
Utopian dreamer: Kurt Eisner
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
Dreamers
by Volker Weidermann
(Pushkin Press, £16.99)
PLATO infamously wanted to banish poets from his republic. What happens, though, when poets end up in charge of one? Volker Weidermann's Dreamers, a moving, novelistic retelling of the short-lived Bavarian Council Republic founded in 1918, provides an account of the time this briefly became a reality.
With a cast drawn from the pantheon of 20th century German writers, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann, it brilliantly resurrects an oft-forgotten episode when poets took power and were no longer merely the ”unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Shelley once claimed.
Briskly narrated in an immersive present tense, Weidermann sweeps the reader up in those febrile months. Out of the rubble of WWI, the German revolution is in full swing and, on November 7, thousands are out on the streets while the ancien regime struggles to maintain order.
More from this author
Uniquely gripping visions of the hidden social, economic and spiritual forces at play in 20th-century Edinburgh
Calum Barnes looks at the books that are making sense of our darkest days
It's difficult not to draw parallels between the insurrectionary attempt to overthrow the Scottish government in 1820 and today, says CALUM BARNES
The truth about the life of Argentine Trotskyist J Posadas is indeed stranger than fiction
