Reading List # 126
An entirely subjective list of things happening in Berlin
June 6
Sebald Remembering
“I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, cutting myself off from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back after it, and when I arrive I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely shall find that all moments of time have coexisted simultaneously.” So wrote W.G. Sebald in his final novel Austerlitz (2001), published only a few months before his death in a car accident.
At Sebald Remembering, writers Marcel Krueger, Paul Scraton, and Madeleine Watts will discuss Sebald’s work and his legacy in a conversation moderated by Sanders Isaac Bernstein.
After a short break, Berlin writers will be invited to read their own work inspired by Sebald and the theme of crisis.
(EN/MULT)
8 pm | Lettrétage, Veteranenstraße 21
June 9
»Wenn ich deine Worte lese, finde ich den Weg zurück nach Hause«
Briefe von Autor:innen im Exil
A reading and book launch party with Francesca Melandri and Lina Atfah and recorded contributions by Shamsia and Nino Haratischwili. Moderated by Ulrike Almut Sandig. Music by DJ Masta Sai.
“Write to me, Nino, because every time I read your words, I find my way back home.” With these words, the Syrian poet Lina Atfah addresses Nino Haratischwili, opening an intimate space for exchange about childhood and war, memory and lost homelands. In the collected correspondence from nearly ten years of Weiter Schreiben, we witness how deep connections develop between writers across personal and political boundaries. These letters are more than memories—they are literary testimonies of their time, weaving personal destinies together with world events. And they show that, if we choose to, we can connect with one another.
Weiter Schreiben is a programme for writers from war and crisis regions that has since 2017 translated, illustrated, and published poetry and prose—primarily from Arabic and Persian. It connects writers in exile with renowned German-speaking authors through tandem partnerships and organises joint readings.
(DE/MULT)
8 pm | Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, Chausseestraße 125
June 10
“Nice Rooms with Beautiful Views”: Airbnb Images from Settlements in the Occupied West Bank
Berlin book launch of “Nice Rooms with Beautiful Views” by Federico Vespignani, which compiles images from hundreds of Airbnb listings in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, examining how occupation extends into the digital realm.
The book opens with an essay by Ido Nahari and Ralph Tharayil about the architecture of dispossession. What is unsettled through the act of settlement? Where does the Unheimlich live in the Heim?
Curated by Literaturhaus Neukölln and moderated by Nele Mailin Obermüller, the conversation will be in English.
(EN)
7 pm | Salon am Moritzplatz, Oranienstraße 58
June 12
there is no first draft of a life: An evening with Victoria Chang & Bianca Stone
Two outstanding poets from the United States, Bianca Stone and Victoria Chang, will read from their most recent collections and speak with Ryan Ruby about their writing.
In her poetry collection With My Back to the World, Victoria Chang enters into dialogue with the abstract, geometric paintings of the artist Agnes Martin. Chang tests and interrogates the ordering principles of the paintings – their grids, fields of color, and lines – in which she recognizes her own depression, “a group of parallel lines that want to touch, but never can,” as well as a sense of fragmentation, a repetition of gestures that can never reveal the larger whole: “No one tells you that you’ll never see your own painting because you’ll be dead.”
In her two most recent collections, The Near and Distant World and What is Otherwise Infinite, Bianca Stone repeatedly returns to the question of how meaning can be asserted when every attempt to grasp something fully – whether theoretically or linguistically – is not only doomed to fail but may even increase the distance between us and things: “My greatest fear: / to be condemned to theory. / Without song, without my trash, / my weird ottava rima, my pointless point.” In contrast, she proposes a poetics of approximation, “infinite in its never-wholeness,” which offers consolation precisely because it does not seek to subsume everything into itself.
The event is part of Poesiefestival Berlin.
(EN)
7.30 pm | Haus für Poesie, Knaackstr. 97