In German, ein Knigge is a book of rules of conduct for a particular field. Duden’s example is ein Knigge für Handelsvertreter, a Knigge for sales representatives. The word comes from Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, who published Über den Umgang mit Menschen, On Dealing with People, in 1788. His book was less a guide to etiquette than a study of how people deal with one another. It did not explain how to use a knife and fork. The rules were added by later editions, one after another.
books
Legitimacy Through Procedure
In 1969, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann published Legitimation durch Verfahren, legitimacy through procedure. Luhmann argued that people do not accept decisions by the state because of ideas about what is right. They accept them because they believe in the procedure that produced them, while the outcome is still open, and because they took part in that procedure.
Conflict as a Creative Force
The sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, a pioneering thinker of liberalism, built his work on one idea about conflict. He did not see it as a disturbance of social order. He saw it as eine hervorragende schöpferische Kraft, an outstanding creative force, of social change. He wrote about it from his 1957 book on class conflict in industrial society to Der moderne soziale Konflikt (The Modern Social Conflict, 1992).
Michael Kohlhaas
Heinrich von Kleist published the full novella Michael Kohlhaas in 1810. Its model was a real man, Hans Kohlhase. A horse dealer loses two of his horses to the injustice of a nobleman. He goes to court, fails, and then takes the law into his own hands. The first sentence calls him einer der rechtschaffensten zugleich und entsetzlichsten Menschen seiner Zeit, one of the most upright and at the same time most terrible men of his age. Then Kleist writes: Das Rechtgefühl aber machte ihn zum Räuber und Mörder. His sense of justice made him a robber and a murderer.
The Grimm Dictionary
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began the Deutsches Wörterbuch in 1838. The first installment appeared on 1 May 1852. Jacob Grimm died on 20 September 1863 while he was working on the entry Frucht, fruit. The dictionary was finished in 1961, after 123 years. It has 33 volumes, 34,824 pages and about 320,000 headwords.
Ten Years Before the Critique
Before the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Immanuel Kant interrupted his writing for ten years, with only a few exceptions. He then wrote the book in about four to five months, gleichsam im Fluge, as if in flight. It appeared in 1781. Two years later, Moses Mendelssohn wrote to Kant and called the book a Nervensaft verzehrendes Werk, a work that consumes the reader’s nervous energy.
Doctors Write About Their Own Mistakes
In January 2008 the Aktionsbündnis Patientensicherheit, an alliance for patient safety, published a brochure called Aus Fehlern lernen, learning from mistakes. In it, 17 doctors, nurses and therapists described mistakes, most of them their own. One of them was Günther Jonitz, president of the Berlin medical association. The foreword asks that such events not be kept quiet, and that the search for someone to blame should not come first. The Bild newspaper reported on Deutschlands mutigste Ärzte, Germany’s bravest doctors.
The Power of Positive Thinking
Norman Vincent Peale published it in 1952, and it stayed on the bestseller lists for years. It is one of the most widely sold books in American publishing history. The title is an argument: that thinking has power, and that the direction of the thinking determines what follows.
Bright-Sided
Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2009 book attacked American positive thinking as a coercive ideology — one that makes suffering the fault of the sufferer and turns compulsory cheerfulness into a workplace requirement.
It was widely read and widely argued with. The critique is evidence for the thing it criticizes: no other culture needed a book like this.
Fixed book prices
Die Buchpreisbindung. German law fixes the retail price of books. Every shop sells the same title at the same price, and the publisher sets it. The price is treated as a property of the book rather than of the transaction.