Being merciful – what role does this term play in our society today? Or does it no longer play a role at all? In four short essays, Dimitré Dinev investigates this subject. He tells of personal experiences, of beggar-children who were hauled off to the West to serve Capitalism, of a country where people speak of security instead of freedom… Dimitré Dinev illustrates a society that cannot be merciful and confronts it with a person who is willing to take on responsibility. He pointedly beds this responsibility in parable-like stories, questions and striking subjects. “Barmherzigkeit” is the first of the series “Unruhe bewahren”, which was developed in cooperation with the Akademie Graz.

We all want to determine our own lives. Our dignity and happiness depend on it. What exactly does that mean? Our thoughts, feelings and actions are based on the circumstances of our life stories. What does it mean to be able to change our lives instead of just letting life happen to us? What role does self-awareness play in all this? When do others help the process of self-determination and when do they become obstacles? How are self-determination and cultural identity connected? And what role can literature play in all this? Bieris contemplations in this book are a sequel to his observations in “Handwerk der Freiheit” (2001).

Philosophy starts with someone thinking unhealthy thoughts. The philosopher in this book however, is not some wacky freelancer. No, he is a civil servant living in a humble civil servant’s apartment with a lifelong job guarantee like it is no longer found in today’s world. As an upright civil servant he never tires of explaining the nature of his special subject to young people: “Philosophizing means learning to relax!” Together with his companions, the full-blooded pug Paul, the two guinea pigs Fritzi & Fratzi and his friend Idiot, our lover of wisdom stumbles through life, shaking, but determined to face each apocalypse that life confronts him with.

The whole world is buzzing and tweeting, in one way or the other, and this is what this book is about. Franz Schuh, a masterful essayist, looks deeper into the existence of boozers and their veering between the utopia of autonomy and the reality of dependency, proofing that suffering and depravation have a great say in who or what humans are. And if Twitter really played a crucial role in the Arab Spring uprisings, there must be more to it than empty tweeting, right? asks Kathrin Passig. And finally, the question on the links between poetry and birds’ twittering is answered by a double expert: Helwig Brunner is both one of the most important young poets in the German-speaking world and a keen ornithologist.

Someone who neither consumes nor produces is redundant - according to the cutthroat logics of late capitalism. International elites claim that overpopulation is our greatest problem. If the population needs to be reduced, who will have to disappear asks Trojanow in his humanist essay that argues against the redundancy of humankind. In his forceful analysis he covers points such as devastation caused by climate change, ruthless neo-liberal politics on the labor market and the apocalypses presented in mass media that we, the seeming winners, fervently consume. One thing we have failed to realize is that these issues also concern us. They concern everyone and everything.

The official victims of the 20th century are commemorated in memorials. But how do we remember the thousands of nameless, secretly buried victims – Jews, Roma, anti-communists or partisans? How do we in Central Europe live in landscapes tainted by innumerable hushed up massacres: from Rechnitz in Burgenland to Kocevski Rog in Slovenia and Kurapaty near Minsk? Martin Pollack relentlessly, yet diligently draws a new, more honest map of our continent. It is a map in which memory and honest location replace shameful secrets and anonymous graves.

Theweleit describes the laughter of killers using a selection of case studies, including German soldiers in British prisoner of war camps during WWII, who are said to have told each other about the atrocities they had committed with considerable mirth. The laughter masks another aspect of killing for pleasure however; the cold rationality with which murderers speak when they justify their acts in public. Anders Breivik’s defence in court starts to sound like a statistical analysis of Norwegian immigration figures, for instance. Theweleit’s essay reveals the language of justification as a foil for sadism, because, according to the author’s provocative argument, anything can be ‘justified’; we should avoid believing a word of it.

Discussions about the threat of privacy from phone hacking scandals and computer-aided searches are commonplace. Anna Kim draws a line from the development of the historic repeal of privacy in interrogation to the current use of digital technologies for government encroachment. In interrogation, the individual was always subdued for the arbitrary good of the public. Anna Kim tells the outrageous interrogation techniques and strategies from ancient history leading up to the dictatorships of modern times, where it was perfected through excessive tailing and show trials. The result is an unusual genealogy of surveillance as a publicly sanctioned violence.

Throughout the world, hi-tech reproduction medicine is paving the way for whole new forms of intervention into human life. Between supply and demand, a global market for dream-child medicine has grown up, its services ranging from in-vitro fertilisation to selecting the child’s sex, from illustrated catalogues of semen and egg-cell donors to the provision of surrogate mothers. Looking at this vast array, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim asks some urgent, critical questions: are the wishes of parents choosing their ideal child compatible with that child’s needs? Should everything technically possible actually be done? And if not, what are the limits and who should define them?