Perlentaucher, German for "pearl diver," has long been one of the best-kept secrets of the German Internet. Each day, its editors cull the pages of the feuilleton sections of the country's top newspapers and present the best of the lot. What the heck is a feuilleton page, you might be asking? Imagine a philosopher like Jacques Derrida hijacking the Washington Post "Style" pages and you'd get a pretty clear idea -- you get everything from musings and rants on the Iraq war to meditations on this season's Prada. At times insightful and entertaining, at others simply pretentious and impenetrable, the feuilleton pages play an important part of the national dialog here. Since its inception, Perlentaucher has done a great job of filtering the best of the German feuilleton into small, well-written truffles. This week, Perlentaucher launched Sign and Sight, the latest entrant in the growing English-language media in Germany and the first continental European companion to Arts & Letters Daily, a Web site American intellectuals have long known and loved. The site includes Perlentaucher's respected daily press review along with translations of a handful of editorials from major German media.

-found over at spiegel international

"There are historical reasons for the lively culture of debate in the German feuilletons. After World War II, the allies issued newspaper licences to Germans with more or less clean records. "Teach the Germans democracy," they said, "but for God's sake, don't let them express themselves: the breeding ground is still fertile." To this day, political editors have been only too happy to oblige. They have kept a close eye on their commentary pages, allowing only authorised in-house editors to have a say. This has turned the political pages into a sterile preceptory where the same people voice off time and again, leaving the chaos of the world and the miseries and joys of discourse to the feuilletons." -from Sign and Sight - The Manifesto by Thierry Chervel :