German literature - German Media

What is literature today (2012)?
What is needed to call something literature?
Who drives literature? Who consumes it?
How does literature link into the media topic?
What is the difference between a newspaper article on-line and a book with a spine?
Haptic value, use, distribution, value to the archive of human knowledge and daily exchange of information?
The Media topic relates directly to the literature topic.  Read the dw article, mirrored here.


We will hear about famous authors who wrote in German. You will hear Goethe and Schiller most often, referring to authors who lived and worked together at the beginning of the 19th century in Weimar. Google Friedrich Schiller and Johann Worlgang von Goethe (the more important one). They are classics, and Goethe is often compared to Shakespeare because Goethe is part of every German curriculum, as is Shakespeare.

To get an idea about literature and the past one thousand years of it in the middle of Europe,  I recommend the on-line article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, here the clip in case you cannot access it on-line. Click on the image on the left and see how the Encyclopaedia Britannica offers related articles that may be of interest for you.