Granta 42: Krauts

The latest issue of the literary and political quarterly features reports on life in the ``new'' Germany, ranging in tone from the bemused to the enraged, with the latter predominating. The focus is set immediately by a brief sketch by Heinrich Boll; written in 1949 but not published until last year, this fragment seethes with anger at the legendary ``efficiency'' of the Germans, as reflected through the ruins of a war-devastated but still complacent nation. Hans Magnus Enzensberger's densely aphoristic piece on the immigrant problem in Western Europe is reminiscent of the best of Walter Benjamin. Christa Wolf's bitter recollection of the Liberation as experienced in what would soon be East Germany is balanced against Ian Buruma's more detached but no less moving rumination on the omission of Jews from East German histories of the Holocaust and Buchenwald memorials. The tone of this volume would be unbearably oppressive but for a delightfully fractured feminist anecdote by Haruki Murakami. The issue also includes two brief accounts from the former Yugoslavia and a somewhat repetitive diary from Baghdad written by an Iraqi diplomat's daughter during the Gulf war. Photos. (Apr.)