Two Men on a Couch: The exchange program "West-Eastern Divan" pairs writers from Germany and the Arab world to counteract the oft-cited clash of cultures through their acquaintance. Joachim Helfer and Rashid al-Daif took the invitation to converse seriously. This resulted in a remarkable book: the Lebanese author writes a protocol centered on his German colleague - specifically as a private individual. He comments on his colleague's same-sex lifestyle and describes views on sexuality, love, and morality that are foreign to him. The German author responds with radical openness, recounting the encounter from his perspective and revealing through the text of his Lebanese colleague the latter's own conflicted notions of gender roles, torn between tradition and modernity. In the end, he makes the...