It wasn’t the beer

How could it be that despite decades of rigorous European unification, of open borders and largely adjusted standards of living, a virus was able to kill up to 40 times more people in one country than in another, only a few hundred kilometers away?

Subscribe to the European Review of Books, from €4.16 per month.

A digital subscription gives you access to our complete Library. A print+digital subscription brings you a print magazine designed like no other.

See our subscription offers

Ingo Niermann

published in

Issue One

Explore the ERB

Curtain call

George Blaustein

An iron curtain makes a powerful canvas. Images from Sven Johne & Falk Haberkorn’s Aus Sicht des Archivs, documenting life in the former East Germany in the 1990s.

Back to the office

Stephan Petermann, Ruth Baumeister & Marieke van den Heuvel

From the office of the future to the office of the past. What endures?

On Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino

Sander Pleij

On Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino, newly translated: a Q&A with Alexander Chee.

Browse topics

Europe