Reading List # 120
An entirely subjective list of things happening in Berlin
April 8
LISTENING SESSION: ENIGMA
In October 2023, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program brought together a group of writers for a multilingual reading performance with music, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Ingeborg Bachmann’s death. The event gathered writers and artists in response to Bachmann’s poem Enigma, composed during her time in Berlin in the early 1960s.
Enigma will now be released as an audio play as part of the series Bad Words. The release will be celebrated with a special listening session, featuring live performances by Tanasgol Sabbagh and Fabian Saul, alongside the recorded piece.
The audio play features readings by Quinn Latimer, Snejanka Mihaylova, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Tanasgol Sabbagh, Nhã Thuyên, and Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, with additional contributions from Jamieson Webster and Marcus Coelen, and music by Fabian Saul.
Curated by Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Fabian Saul, and Mathias Zeiske.
(DE/EN)
7 pm | daadgalerie, Oranienstraße 161
April 9
learning that I share the Earth with animals beyond my imagination.
An evening with Brandon Kilbourne & Lara Rüter, moderated by Asmus Trautsch.
On this evening, two poets come together whose lyrical and essayistic work engages with related questions: How do we humans think about animals — the living and the dead — beyond all anthropomorphism? What do we learn from them, what interests are at play in each case, and at whose expense are these interests pursued?
Brandon Kilbourne (born 1983 in Houma, Louisiana) is an evolutionary biologist at Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. His research focuses primarily on the morphology and variation of anatomical traits in animals, for instance in studies of skull and bone shapes across different species. He is particularly interested in how his field — natural history — is inseparably intertwined with colonialism and, in particular, with transatlantic slavery. These dark undercurrents beneath a history that proclaimed itself enlightened, and the ominous entanglement of knowledge production and exploitation, are also central themes in his poetry debut: the Cave Canem Prize–winning volume Natural History (Graywolf Press 2025).
Lara Rüter (born 1990 in Hanover) shares with Brandon Kilbourne not only an interest in sea cows and dioramas. In her debut volume amoretten in netzen (Verlag Das Wunderhorn 2024), awarded the Kranichsteiner Literaturförderpreis of the Deutscher Literaturfonds, she writes about “romantically foolish” animals such as dolphins — these “super-intelligent creatures” — about a centuries-old Greenland shark, and a white mammoth. Rüter’s book-length essay Affenliebe recounts her years of work at a primate research institute and her everyday interactions with the inhabitants of the monkey house. The book also addresses human relationships with animals, the destruction of habitats, and human fantasies of restitution. Affenliebe is an erudite work populated by key witnesses ranging from Gaius Plinius Secundus and Jane Goodall to Kafka’s ape Rotpeter from Ein Bericht an eine Akademie. At the same time, it is a deeply personal book in which Rüter describes how apes quietly made their way into her life.
(DE/EN)
7.30 pm | Haus für Poesie, Knaackstr. 97
April 9
Debüts der Saison: Alisha Gamisch, Clara Leinemann and Son Lewandowski
New books and their authors in conversation with Yael Inokai and Thorsten Dönges.
In “Parasiti”, Alisha Gamisch powerfully traces the life journeys of three Russian-German women from Novosibirsk in the 1960s to Fürstenfeldbruck in the recent past.
In “Gelbe Monster”, Clara Leinemann writes with astonishing ease about a protagonist who, with the help of other women, manages to leave a relationship that has turned violent.
And in “Die Routinen”, Son Lewandowski uses artistic daring to offer us insights into the life of a competitive gymnast. The book dissects a world that everyone suspects is harsh, but where no one sees—or wants to see—just how exploitative a system is that is coated in so much glitter and spray paint.
(DE)
7.30 pm | Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, Am Sandwerder 5
April 10
Mark Mazower: Writing the History of Antisemitism Today
In this talk, the historian and author Mark Mazower will explore the reasons why contextualisation and historical analysis are indispensable means to understand recent developments in the meaning of the term antisemitism, and offer a way to evaluate the impact of cultural and geopolitical shifts upon its usage. He will question the value of a notion of an eternally unchanging conception of the phenomenon and ask what the costs have been of conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism. He will touch upon the contemporary politics of the issue and ask how we can explain how the fight against prejudice has come to be so politically loaded and fraught with peril.
(EN)
10 am | Centre Marc Bloch, Friedrichstrasse 191