Reading List # 113
An entirely subjective list of things happening in Berlin
February 18
Tomer Gardi - “Liefern”
We see them every day. Whether in Delhi, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, or Berlin, they buzz through cities everywhere: food delivery drivers. With his protagonist Filmon, who fled from Eritrea to Tel Aviv and works there as a delivery driver, Tomer Gardi weaves these delivery stories into a global contemporary epic. “Delivery” (“Liefern”) tells the story of work and exploitation, of love, family, and the great longing for connection. This book is a celebration of storytelling as only Tomer Gardi can do it: profound and humorous, with political sensitivity and literary verve. The novel was written in collaboration with Anne Birkenhauer, who also translated the section “Mimesis” from Hebrew.
Tomer Gardi discusses his new novel with Anne Birkenhauer and Dheeraj Tyagi, MSc in Finance and Investment Science and delivery driver for Uber Eats. The discussion will be moderated by literary critic Insa Wilke.
(DE)
7 pm | Fahimi Bar, Skalitzerstr. 133
February 20
David Vajda - “Diamanten”
He calls them Mačak – tomcats – or his diamonds. Every now and then he also calls them idiots when they don’t understand his jokes. But no matter how many names their ex-Yugoslavian father gives them, no matter how much leg of lamb and wine he serves, he cannot fill the void left by their mother’s death. In his tragicomic debut, David Vajda tells the story of four adult siblings and their eccentric family scattered across the globe, between bohemianism and German upper middle class, between Berlin and Hollywood. They meet in Greece for their uncle’s opulent wedding, in Belgrade at Tito’s grave, in Provence with their esoteric aunt – but they are unable to mourn. Instead, they take refuge in sarcasm or the grotesque and indulge in lighthearted idleness. An extraordinary first novel: amusing, tender, serious.
(DE)
6 pm | Hansabibliothek, Altonaerstr. 15
February 20
What Emerges in Submersion? Experiences, Practices, and Politics from Below
Whether conceived as ocean, ground, soil, a metaphorical underworld, or a political figure of thought, the subsurface has become a key site in contemporary debates on ecological, social, and postcolonial conflicts and power asymmetries across the humanities and beyond. To engage the subterranean, however, is never merely thematic. It entails a conceptual and methodological movement – a practice of submersion that demands critical reflection on the conditions, technologies, aesthetics, and politics of knowledge production.
In The Extractive Zone (2017), Macarena Gómez-Barris introduced the notion of “submerged modes” to describe complex and resistant forms of life and knowledge. These social ecologies are embedded in specific material and media environments – shaped by industrial and digital-capitalist, neocolonial exploitation, dispossession, and surveillance – while simultaneously resisting them. Marked by intangible density and illegible heterogeneity, such perspectives evade an “extractive view” from above: modes of seeing that seek totalizing representation, scientific disciplining, and capitalist valorization. Instead, they call for methods and perspectives that are themselves submerged – a perception from below.
Building on Gómez-Barris’s concept and slightly shifting its terminology, Marie Sophie Beckmann, Petra Löffler, and Amelie Wedel explore the critical potential of sub(e)merging in dialogue with contemporary film and artworks (for example Verena Melgarejo Weinandt’s Invocation, Connecting in Darkness from 2022). What challenges does sub(e)merging pose to dominant modes of representation? How might going beneath the surface become a position from which to perceive, speak, and act differently? And in what ways does sub(e)merging destabilize the ground itself as a site of evidence and knowledge production?
The event will be held in German, but passages from English-language texts will be read aloud.
(DE/EN)
7.30 pm | diffrakt, Crellestr. 22
February 21
Christa Wolf in our day
“Is life identical with time in its unavoidable but mysterious passage?” asked Christa Wolf in the introduction to her book One Day a Year. “While I write this sentence, time passes; simultaneously a tiny piece of my life comes into being—and passes away.”
Wolf certainly knew a thing or two about experiencing time—and about registering in literature the subjective experiences of history. Born in 1929 in Gorzów (then Prussian Landsberg), Wolf experienced the Third Reich as a child before becoming one of the foremost literary figures of the GDR, author of popular novels like “Kassandra”, “Divided Heaven”, and “The Quest for Christa T”. She was a committed socialist and a determined formal innovator; her work, always both political and personal, steered away from socialist realism into the more ambivalent (and more Modernist) domains of what she called “subjective authenticity.” She was critical of the regime—but never quite a dissident—and her refusal to disavow the socialist project, both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has made her a controversial figure across Germany. (Many westerners, in particular, have argued for her proximity to the GDR state to be morally discrediting.) By now, Christa Wolf has fallen considerably out of style. Her Wikipedia page in English even quotes someone saying that authors like her “became irrelevant overnight” when the Wall came down.
But, despite her detractors, Wolf kept writing into her ninth decade, continuing to find new forms and refuse easy conformity. Every year from 1960 to her death in 2011, Wolf wrote a short prose piece describing her experiences of the 27th of September. These pieces—published in English as “One Day A Year”—are diaristic, essayistic, and novelistic in turns. Mundane details meet with intellectual analysis; the political situation is everywhere. The day, that most basic unit of time, brings the great sweep of history into our homes—and vice versa—both under communism then and under capitalism now.
At “Christa Wolf in Our Day”, we will return to Wolf’s literary project in our own period of moral and political crisis. Katy Derbyshire—acclaimed translator of “One Day A Year (2000-2011)”—will join book critic Alexander Wells for a discussion of Wolf’s life and (late) work moderated by the writer and novelist Paul Scraton. Then, after a drinks break, the evening will resume with a reading of short pieces submitted by the contemporary writers of Berlin. All are welcome, even Ulrich Greiner.
(EN)
8.30 pm | Lettrétage, Veteranenstr. 21