Media library for non-fiction

Here you will find English-language non-fiction texts for the 21st century, and translations from German into English.

Media library

The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde

Wilde’s essay is an early comment on how people “realise themselves”, and hence also a criticism of the age of the industrial “people of the crowd”, an age in which human behaviour is determined by outside forces and in which people struggle to find out what they “essentially are”.

Dream Kitsch by Walter Benjamin

Why does kitsch, particularly kitsch art, exist? A viewer who is attracted to this type of art clings to the illusionary power of a world of things that has already perished, says Walter Benjamin, the renowned Weimar Republic art critic.

Sofa Enlightenment by Robert Broughton

“This is the story of one man’s journey to enlightenment in the material world. My greatest success was in overcoming myself. Breaking free of the matrix of conditioned thought that I had falsely believed to be ‘me’. In the process I would walk through the valley of insanity.”

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Information on copyright

According to the German Copyright Act (Urheberrechtsgesetz), copying and distributing a text without the consent of the “right holder” is prohibited until 70 years after the death of the author. (A translator is an “author” with regard to his or her translation.)

Public domain texts

On 1 January following the 70th anniversary of the author’s death, the rights to his or her texts become freely available to everyone. Anyone can do whatever they like with such texts. This legal status is called “being in the public domain”.

Copyleft licences

Apart from the two strict legal states„public domain“ or „copyright“, a middle course exists that makes use of copyright law but basically and generally permits certain types of use. The term “copyleft” is often applied to this middle course.

Creative Commons

The licence models created by the “Creative Commons” project (CC) are particularly widely used in this context. The following are two of the most important licences:

Texts published under the “BY-NC-ND” Creative Commons licence (Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives) are not in the public domain and may not be used commercially without the consent of the author.

Texts published under the “BY-SA” Creative Commons licence (Attribution - Share Alike) are also not in the public domain. Provided such a text is attributed to its author, and publication is carried out under the BY-SA licence as well, such a text may be used both non-commercially and commercially, and it may be changed.