From the joys of Mill Road (and that charity shop) in Saumya Balsari's wonderful The Cambridge Curry Club to the glories of the colleges and the Backs (everyone from Vladimir Nabokov to Sebastian Faulkes) ... from the sylvan delights of Grantchester courtesy of Jill Dawson, Benjamin Wood, Rupert Brooke, Sylvia Plath and the Pink Floyd to the realities of modern Cambridge with Alexander Masters and Michelle Spring ... plus some amazing new writers on their city.
city-pick Cambridge is a special performance of some of the best-ever writing on this most literary cities researched, devised and performed by the city-pick team and actor and man of letters Nick Dobson on Saturday 14 April, 16.30 - 17.30. Tickets are available fromwww.cambridgewordfest.co.uk
city-pick Cambridge is part of an Arts Council England funded project as Oxygen Books works with some key UK cities to find some of the best writing, past, present and even future, on these metropolises which will then be performed at their literature festivals.
If you're in Cambridge next month do pop in and say 'hi' - we love to meet our city-pick readers!
Well, we at Oxygen Books didn’t know Hull at all when we were commissioned by the Humber Mouth Festival to produce a special event about Hull writing last year.
Admittedly a little trepidation did set in. After all, we were used to working in some of the best-known global cities and finding some of the best writing about these places for our city-pick travel guide series.
And as we always allow our writers to shape the 360 degree view of a city we never quite know what to expect.
But we were, as they say, pleasantly surprised. If not gobsmacked.
There were the great and the good writers but so many other writers, published and unpublished, which gave a new meaning to the word cornucopia.
It made us realise – if we didn’t know already – that cities big and small all have amazing stories to tell, past, present and future.
Following Hull, with a few minor excursions to New York and working in Istanbul, St Petersburg and Jerusalem we decided to return home.
Thanks to the English Arts Council we were funded this year to work with writers and readers in Cambridge, Nottingham and Manchester to find the very best writing on these cities and produce special events at each of their literature festivals.
We put out ‘call-outs’ through the media and literature and reader development teams and others. So far the response – and material received – has been little short of phenomenal.
Our first event here is at Cambridge Wordfest in April and it will be a portrait of a city that we hope is both inspiring and revealing. Did anyone know, by the way, that there’s A Pink Floyd Fan’s Guide to Cambridge?
There will also be a podcast for all our UK city-pick events and we’ll send out links.
We hope anyone attending festivals in these cities this year will pop in at our events. Our ‘Around the World in Eighty Books’ event will also be featured at the Redbridge and then Derbyshire Literature Festivals this year. More details are here and we look forward very much to seeing you if you can make any of these dates:
Which brings us back to the day job. Following city-pick New York we’ve been working on city-pick St Petersburg, with a brilliant team that includes Marina Samsonova on the ground in St Petersburg and Academia Rossica’s London literature consultant James Rann making sure we get the cream of contemporary writing on this endlessly fascinating city. city-pick St Petersburg is published on October 24 2012, with a major London launch, which we’ll let everyone know about.
city-pick Istanbul, out in March 2013, will tie-in with Turkey as ‘Market Focus’ (basically the star of the show) at the London Book Fair. It already has a fab introduction by novelist Barbara Nadel, well known for her Istanbul crime novels. We’ll keep you updated.
Thanks for all your support for our city-pick series – we really do value this. And do carry on sending us your ideas and suggestions, which are always invaluable.
Have a great Spring with lots of travel and reading!
P S If you’re based outside the UK you might be interested to know that all city-pick titles are now available P & P free (and with discounts) at www.bookdepository.com
Anne Patterson of Hello Ottawa, with the Parliament building in the background.
There is a rich pile of hyperlocal blogs run by dedicated volunteers across the country but digital storytelling – giving voice to local people and telling of their relationship with their town or city in the tradition of the Gentle Author – is surprisingly scarce. It is happening in some locations, however.
Jason Polan is sketching every person in New York: on the train, on the street, in a gallery, from behind. For the last four years, the artist has roamed the streets with a pen and pad, sketching passing strangers, mostly without them realising. Depending on his other artistic commitments, some days he draws a couple of people; others, he will find 100. He started, he says, because he wanted a project in which he could interact with fellow New Yorkers. He encourages people to email him specific details of where they will be and at what time to increase their chances of getting drawn. "I hope that it shows there are a lot of interesting people here who are doing a lot of interesting things," he says. So far, he has clocked up an impressive 17,000. Only 8.16 million to go then. His blog ends with a promise: "When the project is completed we will all have a get-together."
Two women shopping in Delhi, as seen on The Delhi Walla blog. Photograph: Mayank Austen Soofi/The Delhi Walla
Five years ago, Mayank Austen Soofi, "a small-town guy" from Uttar Pradesh, was a frustrated writer working as a waiter in a five-star hotel in Delhi. Daily excursions into his new city were his escape; he wrote about the city to understand it himself and The Delhi Walla blog, created in his local library, was the result. A celebration of the food, culture and books of India's capital, it aims to profile 1% of Delhi's 11 million population. "Each seems to live in a different Delhi. To have a fleeting sense of their personal Delhis makes me appreciate the nuances of my Delhi," he says. His approach is similar to the Gentle Author in that he eschews negativity and criticism. "I write without intending to be provocative," he said in an interview with Rediff.com. "I don't like writing bad things about people. No point." He has started a reading club called The Delhi Proustians, written four guidebooks and a new book will be published by Penguin India later this year. "I think it's the best narrative non-fiction to have come out of India after Mala Sen's excellent India's Bandit Queen. You see, I don't fake modesty," he says.
Dismayed by the stereotypical portrayal of Cardiff as a city for hen and stag dos and sporting events, freelance writer Helia Phoenix and her friends Adam Chard, a designer and photographer, and Simon Bradwick, a web developer, set up We Are Cardiff in 2010. Phoenix was inspired by Julie Michelle, the aspiring photographer behind I Live Here: SF, a blog about local residents of San Francisco (currently in abeyance after Michelle's partner suffered a stroke). We Are Cardiff tells the stories of ordinary Cardiff folk, from korfball player Terry Matthews to Dan Allsobrook, an IT consultant and allotment-lover. Some, such as English student Alice Paetel, give paeans of praise to "the nature that surrounds the city so tightly" while others, such as music producer Lee Marshall, lament the replacement of "a colony of weird and fascinating shops like a coral reef" with "another identikit franchise". Most importantly, says Phoenix, the people who are featured can write their own life story – an antidote to the way that mainstream media interviews are often spun. We Are Cardiff is now making a documentary based on some of its 60 interviewees. Phoenix is a great admirer of Spitalfields Life but is not puzzled why more blogs don't follow its lead. "I'm not surprised that more people don't do it because it's too time-consuming," she says.
A thriving hyperlocal site on the Isle of Wight has helped promote Mr Caulkhead, a mysterious character who has been broadcasting fantastic audio shorts about the island's local dialect. Using a telephone and ipadio (free software enabling people to stream audio via a phone live to the web), Mr Caulkhead has broadcast his Colloquialisms over the internet – weird words in a thick local accent that are accompanied by an amusing story illustrating the word's usage. Ventnor Blog also published his broadcasts alongside illustrations by a local artist. The result is a warm, witty history that could only ever work online. Mr Caulkhead had a prolific run of words last winter but sadly has not broadcast an episode for a year, although he was on Twitter recently promising some more words for his adoring audience.
A "love letter to Portland and an anthology of its residents, neighborhoods and moods", it was also inspired by I Live Here: SF. Unsurprisingly for a creative city with such a firm sense of itself, Portland has other blogs depicting the local community, including one that publishes a photograph (or more than one) every day: portlandoregondailyphoto.blogspot.com
In portraits and interviews, Hello Ottawa explores local people and their relationship to their city. It was created by Anne Patterson, a community manager and new media strategist living in the city.
In its daily blogposts, Spitalfields Life aims to portray the full colour of life in London's East End. But who is the mysterious 'Gentle Author' behind this extraordinary work of social history? Patrick Barkham in The Guardian investigates.
A Baishakhi Mela procession in Spitalfields, just one of the colourful – and not so colourful – facets of life recorded by the Gentle Author. Photograph: The Gentle Author/Spitalfields Life
The author of this fascinating and herculean social history, which forms an ongoing blog, Spitalfields Life, now turned into a book, is known only as "the Gentle Author". I have been summoned to meet him or her at E Pellicci, an Italian cafe run by Maria Pellicci, who features in the book. Maria's son Nevio is a fan of the Gentle Author (or GA), despite having his eyebrows likened to Groucho Marx's. "S/he writes so nicely about people," says Nevio.
When GA arrives, they are pathologically reluctant to discuss their age, family, working life or whether they live with anybody at all (apart from, as readers of the blog will know, Mr Pussy). "All readers need to know is that the writer's intention is benign," they say. To make a readable story, I assumed I would identify GA's gender but s/he looks so mortified when I mention this that I relent. Plenty of blogs have thrived on the frisson of anonymity, most notably Belle de Jour, but this does not feel like a publicity stunt. GA stresses their sincere commitment to placing their subjects, not their self, in the spotlight. Besides, some readers have such a firm conception of GA as female or male that unmasking their gender would be like ripping the false beard off Father Christmas in front of a small child.
"I'm not being mean. I think it's not part of this story," says the Gentle Author about their identity and background. But GA, who I feel obliged to record is a fragile-looking middle-aged bohemian with pale blue eyes and a terrible cough that is the remnant of pneumonia, eventually reveals some of the motivations behind what is a deeply personal project. An only child, after GA's father died, s/he moved back to their childhood home in Devon to care for their mother. She had dementia and her only child cared for her for five years. She was paralysed for the final two years; GA fed her with a spoon. "I lived in the presence of death for two years," s/he says. "I made a promise to my mother that she would be able to die at home. Then I made a new promise, which was to write about the people around me and record their stories."
Paul the Urban Shepherd in Spitalfields Market, Spitalfields, London. Photograph: Jeremy Freedman/Spitalfields Life
GA calculated there were 10,000 days until they were the same age as when their parents died. Rather crazily, s/he vowed to write a story for every day left. After GA's parents died, s/he sold their house and with the proceeds bought a tiny cottage in Spitalfields. Finding people with tales to tell has not proved difficult. Dining in E Pellicci quickly illustrates how the East End is rich in stories. As we eat steak-and-kidney pudding, another diner, Henrietta Keeper, stands up and clears her throat. She is tiny, in her 80s and she sings A Beautiful Night for Love. The cafe claps and cheers. You couldn't make it up. The Gentle Author rushes over, notepad in hand, and requests an interview.
"I believe in microcosm, that everything in the world is here," says GA. Everything in the world might be in the East End but could such fascinating stories really be found in more insular, monochrome communities? "There is something extra here," admits GA, who nevertheless argues it could be replicated anywhere because people are infinitely fascinating. "I don't understand why everybody isn't doing what I'm doing. I don't understand why this isn't everywhere. It's free to do. It just takes time."
However, GA admits to being in a privileged position, without dependants or mortgage, devoting all hours to the blog and leading an ascetic life based on the sale of a few online adverts and on charity – receiving a veg box from a local grocer and a weekly chicken from another friend. "Only someone as privileged as me could be as poor as me." Spitalfields Life, they say dryly, has been "a catastrophic success".
The East End may be crowded with interesting characters but writing 900,000 well-crafted words in less than three years is a towering achievement. GA seems extraordinarily driven and has barely left the East End, except to interview a 90-year-old former sea cadet in Dover and Crayfish Bob on the Thames. They are now assisted by a younger writer who sets up interviews (a time-consuming process) and local photographers happy to publish their work online. Last year GA took two weeks off to work on the book; two other writers took over chronicling duties.
Reminiscent of other projects giving voice to ordinary people, such as Ronald Blythe's Akenfield, the story of a Suffolk village in the 1960s, and Craig Taylor's updating of the format in last year's Londoners, Spitalfields Life is undoubtedly a significant work of social history. The blog is being archived in both digital and printed form by the British Library and the Bishopsgate Institute. Rather than a stereotypical portrayal of East End poverty, GA calls it "a history of resourcefulness", of "people inventing their own ways to live in an extraordinary and infinite variety".
Sammy Minzly serving beigels at his Beigel Bake shop in Spitalfields, east London. Photograph: The Gentle Author/Spitalfields Life
It is also a riposte to the conventions of the arts, history and media. GA insists they would never accept, for instance, Arts Council funding, believing that government grants compromise an artist's freedom of choice. The internet has created a "great liberation", GA believes, in which "the means of printing and distribution has been given to writers to write what they choose". But most writers in mainstream publishing tend to focus on celebrities. "There's this sense, which I reject, that famous people are more interesting than non-famous people," says GA.
The Gentle Author's gentle style is rapturously received by a loyal band of readers around the world. "There is a great appetite for people who have led self-respecting lives," GA thinks. It might seem churlish to criticise such a heartfelt exercise but Spitalfields Life does not dwell on dissent in the community. The author admits they were "too frightened" to leave their house and bear witness to last summer's riots. What about the dark side? GA says s/he avoids featuring anyone they "can't feel sympathy for" and so Spitalfields Life does not feature any crooks or bankers. The whole approach is to "not be wiser" than the person they are interviewing; does this mean no critical scrutiny?
"I'm not presuming to be objective. My subjectivity is very apparent," says GA. "You always allow people to say what they want to say and sometimes people say contentious things." There is some shade amid all this light – Spitalfields Life records one local's battle with horrific racism and another who was tortured by Reggie Kray – and GA harbours strong critical feelings about, for instance, the "pretty iniquitous" displacement of local businesses by the Olympics. "Nobody I know in the East End has managed to get a ticket." The Olympics' impact on the East End has been interrogated through some blogposts, with GA thundering about the "autocratic caprices" of the Olympic Delivery Authority in one about the Eton Mission, a historic rowing club not permitted to use the River Lea for weeks around the games because of a supposed security risk.
A sense of documenting the last of things pervades Spitalfields Life. GA says they don't intend it to be elegiac but tries to catch things before they disappear. Older interviewees also have more stories. GA does not, however, fear the East End itself is coming to an end. The area is constantly changing but doesn't gentrification threaten a more permanent kind of change, tidying up the chaos and throttling the creativity? "That's what I thought before I started but the strength of culture is such that people who come here tend to go native. I have complete faith in the tenacity of people here to overcome the tyranny of any circumstances. All the people who have moved around, and all the buildings that have gone, you would think this place should have been wiped out culturally and it hasn't."
And so the Gentle Author slips into the East End beyond E Pellicci's, a slightly stooped, rather shy figure, in search of a mere 9,100 more stories. "Without me wanting to sound like a sentimentalist, I write about the things that delight me," s/he says. "It's given me a beautiful life."
Cambridge has to be one of the most literary cities in Britain if not the world!
So many writers like to wax lyrical here (though a minority have their doubts) that it seemed the ideal city to collect the very best published and unpublished writing on this most inspiring of places.
The result, thanks to support from the Arts Council and Cambridge writers and readers, is a city-pick Cambridge event at Cambridge's amazing Wordfest Book Festival.
Now in its tenth year this festival features (amongst others) Ian Rankin, Michael Portillo, Michael Rosen, Julian Clary and scores of others.
We're very honoured to be included presenting and performing the result of our 'call-out' which includes the best of familiar names but also some less familiar and new Cambridge writers.
Bob Dylan in London in 1962. Photograph: Brian Shuel/Redferns
A rollicking rush on guitar is followed by the line, "I don't know why I love you like I do", sung with something between a hollow laugh and a stab of pain; and after one minute and 37 seconds it is over. Side one, track one, of the first album by Bob Dylan, the most elusive, talented and influential American performer and poet of the 20th century.
There follows a classic talkin' blues that sounds like the work of an old hand, but expresses the awe of a young man on arrival in New York – then the voice, more vehement, intensifies for a searing third track that strokes the listener's every exposed nerve that little too roughly – a spiritual called In My Time of Dyin', with the singer's girlfriend's lipstick tube used to try to imitate the slide guitar of blues wizard Robert Johnson.
The album – entitled Bob Dylan – was released half a century ago (19 March 1962) , by a 20-year-old from Minnesota who had arrived in Manhattan the previous year, aboard a freight train. It had taken him two months to get much further than Times Square, before trying his luck in places like "an unusual beer and wine place on 3rd Street… now called Cafe Bizarre", as Dylan would later recall. "The patrons were mostly workingmen who sat around laughing, cussing, eating red meat, talking pussy… Talent scouts," he wrote, "didn't come to those dens."
Dylan finally arrived in the creative ferment of Greenwich Village with burning ambition to match it – "impatient to be seen, to impress important people, to learn", as Robert Shelton, the music critic who became Dylan's biographer, puts it. In the city Dylan described as "mysterious" but "capital of the world", he pressed himself through the doors of the coffee houses and folk clubs: the Commons, the Wha', The Gaslight – and Gerde's Folk City.
"I was there to find the singers," Dylan would write, "the ones I'd heard on record – Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Ed McCurdy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee." Dylan's first album was released in the same year that the Beatles recorded Love Me Do; Jimi Hendrix was still serving in the 101st Airborne Division; Frank Sinatra cut an album with Count Basie; and Dmitri Shostakovich premiered his 13th Symphony, with two more to go and 13 years longer to live. "Although only 20 years old," read a review of Bob Dylan in the New York Times, "Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months."
Throughout the 50 years since then, Dylan has maintained his enigma, which is all the more remarkable for having written what is regarded as an intimate autobiography, Chronicles.
His girlfriend Suze Rotolo – photographed on Dylan's arm for the cover of his second album, TheFreewheelin' Bob Dylan – wrote a memoir recounting the depths of Dylan's determination to stay mysterious at that time: he span her a yarn about having been abandoned as a child in New Mexico. Rotolo had suspicions about his "Welsh name" and prised his real one, Zimmerman, out of him at the apartment they would eventually share on West 4th Street (though she liked calling him Boo Radley after the couple went to see To Kill a Mockingbird).
But 2004's Chronicles does at least allow us to quote Dylan on himself after all the decades of elliptical responses and riddles with which he baffled interviewers. Most important, we can read his own account of coming to know the man who inspired this first album more than anyone: the hobo father and political conscience of American folk, Woody Guthrie. Nothing on the album is written by Guthrie, but the traditionals are sung as he might have performed them.
Dylan recalls buying Guthrie Raleigh cigarettes to smoke in hospital and singing Tom Joad to its author during long afternoons by his deathbed. Only two songs on the first album are written by Dylan: Talkin' New York and Song to Woody – the former adapts a Guthrie talkin' blues and the latter is a homage. Dylan's reasoning for this is disarmingly frank: "I can't say when it occurred to me to write my own songs. I couldn't have come up with anything comparable or halfway close to the folk song lyrics I was singing to define the way I felt about the world… Folk songs played in my head, folk songs are the underground story."
Playing at Folk City, Dylan won admirers and jealous adversaries. Joan Baez would recall: "He looked like an urban hillbilly… bouncing from foot to foot, he seemed dwarfed by the guitar… He spat out the words to his own songs. They were original and refreshing, if blunt and jagged. He was absurd, new and grubby beyond words… but captivating."
However, Dylan failed to turn his success in the cellars into a recording deal – he was rejected by Elektra, Folkways and Vanguard. Then he met John Hammond, at a rehearsal in an apartment rented by Baez's sister, Mimi Fariña, and her husband Richard.
Hammond was the genius who produced Dylan's first album, adding the young singer to the list of those he had nurtured, which included Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, Bessie Smith and Count Basie.
By November 1961, Hammond was ready to move his new talent into Columbia's Studio A on Seventh Avenue. "I signed him on the spot," he once recalled. "We made our first album almost immediately. His guitar playing, let us say charitably, was rudimentary, and his harmonica was barely passable, but he had a good sound and a point of view and an idea. He was very disenchanted with the social system. I encouraged him to put all his hostility on tape, because I figured this was the way, really, to get to the true Bob Dylan."
Some of the songs were recorded in two takes, such was Dylan's germinal feel for the music, the folk, the blues. The only problems arose from Dylan popping his Ps, too close to the mike.
The immediately astonishing impact of the album, by any measure, is the contrast between the image of the unsmiling but fresh-faced lad in his cap and the depth of feeling and range in the singing between love, rage, sorrow and a fixation with death. The core of the album is Fixin' To Die, sung as though he were pleading for the life he is about to lose, such is Dylan's understanding of the intentions of its author, the great Delta blues master Booker T Washington – aka "Bukka" – White.
And so it continued: the lighter guitar touch on Baby Let Me Follow You Down, heralding the mighty ballads to come, a definitive claim on House of the Rising Sun and Elizabeth Cotten's Freight Train Blues – a choice worth noting not just for the lore of the American railroad and whistle of iron snakes winding through perpetuity, but also Dylan's own reflection that "I'd seen and heard trains from my earliest childhood days and the sight and sound of them always made me feel secure".
As ever, there is humour, too. Baez, Dylan's lover in the period immediately after the album, wrote that "his humour was dry, private, and splendid".
The estimable British writer on Dylan, Michael Gray, argues interestingly that the real value of the album is not only that it showed "more than a hint of a highly distinctive vision", but also "served as a fine corrective for Greenwich Village: it was the opposite of effete," he says, "in the context of what was happening at the time – American folk culture all but obliterated, and a stagnating 'folk' cult established as if in its place."
In Chronicles, we have Dylan's recollection of the books he devoured off other people's shelves during the time he made this record, which illuminate those to follow: Shelley, Poe, Faulkner, Gogol, The White Goddess by Robert Graves, whom he would later meet in London; "Balzac is hilarious," writes Dylan – and there is his "morbid fascination" with Von Clausewitz's writing on warfare. Books that can be said to play their part among the myriad influences on what was to follow – indeed, once Dylan had embarked along the creative road he would take from Bob Dylan onwards, it was a while before he returned to the album in his core performing repertoire.
"Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain," he wrote. "You have to know and understand something, and then go past the vernacular."
Half a century ago though, the vernacular had a narrative and poetry of its own. But in his review for the New York Times, Shelton observed that, despite moments of "off-target melodrama", Dylan's "highly personalised approach towards folk song is still evolving".
From Virginia Woolf on Oxford Street to Monica Ali on Brick Lane - the best-ever writing on London for the 2012 Olympics?
‘There are some books that you spot and immediately curse under your breath – “Why didn’t I think of that? What a great idea!” The city-pick series is one such idea …’ Bruce Elder, The Sydney Morning Herald
city-pick series: New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Venice, Amsterdam, Dublin, paperback, $14.25
We were on the hot slopes of the Acropolis and wanted to read a selection (not too big) of writing about Athens. We didn’t want another guide book. We wanted fresh, exciting writing that illuminated the city. There wasn’t anything. Not in Athens, London or New York. So we – I’m ex-UK HarperCollins – decided to create our own titles in 2009.
The result is Oxygen Books’ innovative city-pick series featuring some of the best-ever writing on favourite world cities. It’s already been called ‘superb .. like having your own iPad loaded with different tomes’ (London Times), ‘wonderful’ (London Guardian) ‘sublime’ (The Sydney Morning Herald) and praised for its ‘super-relevant destinations’ (Lonely Planet Magazine)
Each paperback book includes over fifty writers, fiction and non-fiction, past and especially present, including newly translated writing. So far we’ve published titles on New York, Berlin, Paris, London, Venice, Amsterdam and Dublin – St Petersburg, Istanbul and Jerusalem/ Tel Aviv follow soon. More details are on www.oxygenbooks.co.uk
All our books are now available in North America at www.bookdepository.com (P & P free) and we’d very much like to send you our titles for your perusal.
Please do let us know if you need any more information.
Our UK contacts are malcolm.burgess3@btopenworld.com, +44 (0) 1277 263770
From Margaret Atwood, Jacques Derrida and Derek Jarman to Angela Carter, Julian Barnes and David Grossman there are literally hundreds of amazing discussions with our leading writers, artists, filmmakers and philosophers.
These were the glory days of the ICA - a pure exercise in nostalgia for those of us who around then but also some wonderful discoveries for those who weren't or who just couldn't catch everything at the time.
Culture flourished in the eighties and these recordings show how.
Thank you British Library for making them public again
Members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch performing at the Opera House in Cairo in 2009. The company is appear at Sadler's Wells and the Barbican in London. Photograph: Mohamed Omar/EPA
Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the popular British perception of German culture involved either a stout opera singer in a horned helmet warbling Wagner, or Nena on Top of the Pops singing about 99 Red Balloons.
Much has changed in the intervening two decades, not least Berlin's coronation as a "poor but sexy" international capital of cool. Now the range of Germany's cultural influence, and the extent to which it has been embraced in the UK, will be revealed with a number of high-profile projects in London this summer.
In June, the late choreographer Pina Bausch's revered dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal is coming to Sadler's Wells and the Barbican. The next month, Tate Modern's Turbine Hall will be filled with an installation by Tino Sehgal, a Berlin-based artist whose works involve performers interacting with viewers, which Tate Modern's director, Chris Dercon, describes as "almost like a mental and bodily exercise".
From May, the Barbican will show Bauhaus: Art as Life, the biggest UK exhibition of the German modernist design school's work for 40 years. Later in the year the Serpentine gallery will exhibit the work of German artists Thomas Schütte and Hans-Peter Feldmann.
All five projects have been supported by the Goethe-Institut, founded to promote German culture, to celebrate its London branch's 50th anniversary and the reopening of its headquarters.
Yet they are far from the only Teutonic heavyweights hitting the UK. In the last few days alone, Saturday saw composer Heiner Goebbels play the Southbank Centre in London , while on Friday Nottingham's Capital FM arena reverberated to the sounds – and pyrotechnics – of Rammstein, the heavy metal band. Even Paul Weller, once a quintessential Britrocker, is getting in on the act: his forthcoming album Sonik Kicks is partly inspired by 70s Krautrock band Neu!
The rest of the world's growing preoccupation with German art was demonstrated in the title of an exhibition in New York last year curated by Anke Kempkes and the British critic Michael Bracewell: Germany is Your America.
For Sabine Hentzsch, director of the Goethe-Institut London, such an influx of German culture is the culmination of a process that began with unification, when clubbers and fans of electronic music from the east and west came together to give Berlin its pounding techno soundtrack. The other factor, she says, is Berlin's cheapness and thriving subculture, which has made it the adopted home of artists from around the world, including Britain's Douglas Gordon and Tacita Dean.
German artists have also settled in the UK, for instance Wolfgang Tillmans, who studied in Bournemouth and went on to win the Turner prize. In 2006 he told Butt magazine: "I liked the smell of English homes and bathrooms, the mix of a damp carpet and apricot scented potpourri … Marmite, the repressed but omnipresent sexuality, weak milky tea on a rainy afternoon by the sea, the spongy bread – basically all the things people don't like, and what one would see as signs of how pathetic and backwards England was, or is, I liked."
Dr Anja Baumhoff, lecturer in history of art and design at Loughborough University, who worked on the Barbican's Bauhaus show and has lived in the UK for eight years, believes the 2006 World Cup helped popularise German culture beyond artistic and intellectual circles.
Now, she says, "the fact that Germany is playing such a big political and economic role means that people are interested in what we're doing. It's not just a globalised world, it's a mobile world, and people are moving from the UK to travel back and forth from Berlin – it's not a big deal."
However, the artists themselves are less interested in representing Germany than exploring the ambiguities of being at the meeting point of several cultures. "If you travel a lot you feel a certain proximity to every culture but also a kind of distance," says Sehgal, who was born in London to a German mother and Indian father.
He points to his 2005 installation in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. There, three guards jumped out of their chairs and hopped around chanting in English: "This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary!"
"In the German pavilion a heavy, relatively dark piece is expected. I decided to do something quite light, in English, with a touch of humour," Sehgal said. Not that this means his Turbine Hall installation will be German in tone: "We've been thinking a lot about English culture, but not in a direct way influencing the piece. I experience London as a crossroads. The Turbine Hall belongs to this increasingly global moment more than the Centre Pompidou, which opened 30 years ago – that's my feeling."
"London has been celebrating German art since Anthony D'Offay," says Dercon, referring to the gallerist who in the 80s represented some of the country's most significant artists, from Joseph Beuys to Gerhard Richter. "We are very well informed about what's going on in Germany and that's why the Geothe-Institut is saying let's go deeper and let's see where it's heading."
However, there are some aspects of German culture that still have little traction in the UK. Hentzsch says it is still difficult to find German contemporary authors in English translations in the UK. Baumhoff says that "the Brits don't like modernism – just look at Prince Charles".
Finally, there's pop music. "The Germans have embraced British culture for the last 50 years – big time," Sehgal says. "German pop music is on a much lower level of reception in Germany. There's no German Adele."
'This sublime and 'literary' travel book operates on so many levels ... some of the greatest writers painting the city in magical word pictures' The Sydney Morning Herald
'Another wonderfully atmospheric guide ... if you are going to St Petersburg then this is the book for you.' Hot Brands Cool Places
'the latest literary treat from the city-pick series ... as a guide to the atmosphere and spirit of the city, it's unmissable' Lonely Planet Magazine
'Superb ... It's like having your own iPad loaded with different tomes, except that this anthology contains only the best passages' The Times
'The latest triumph of distillation. There's everything here - you'll read about walking and drinking, being poor and being poetic, new wealth and newcomers, old timers and returning natives' The Good Web Guide
'The latest offering in this impressive little series concentrates on the spirit of London as seen through the eyes of an eclectic selection of writers. It's an exciting selection with unexpected gems.' Sunday Telegraph
'This wonderful anthology explores what it is really like to be a Berliner by bringing together extracts about the city from a range of genres, including some specially translated' The Guardian
'A new breed of city guide ... it makes for some delightful discoveries - even for those of us who think we know this city well' Time Out
Buy from Amazon
The Soundtrack to the Cities
Click Here From Paris, Berlin and Rome to New York, Istanbul and Mumbai and many more enjoy the ten songs that truly sum up each city.
Two women shopping in Delhi, as seen on The Delhi Walla blog. Photograph: Mayank Austen Soofi/The Delhi Walla
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Paul the Urban Shepherd in Spitalfields Market, Spitalfields, London. Photograph: Jeremy Freedman/Spitalfields Life
Sammy Minzly serving beigels at his Beigel Bake shop in Spitalfields, east London. Photograph: The Gentle Author/Spitalfields Life
