Das große Verdrängnis unserer Zeit: Lesung mit Willi van Hengel und Peter Zemla

In the organizer's words:

The authors Willi van Hengel (Berlin) and Peter Zemla (Bayreuth) meet in their latest literary creations, which are as surrealistic as they are humoristic and grotesque.

The life of the protagonist in van Hengel's latest work "Entstellung des Gesichts. Eine Verirrung" (kul-ja! publishing, February 2025) comes to a head. After the death of his father, he takes a new job at a scientific publishing house and falls in love with his colleague. But what looks like a promising new beginning turns out to be an illusion:

The Nameless One's past and traumas bubble to the surface - and with them the thought that the most important person in his life, his mother, could also soon die. Caught up in this fear, he is driven towards the supposedly inevitable.

Peter Zemla's protagonist, Melchior Ferner, the blameless manager of an indoor swimming pool, on the other hand, fishes a municipal summons out of the post - inviting him to his own execution. Despite challenges, despite calls from his wife and daughter to resist, he decides to cooperate. What Ferner has not reckoned with: the bizarre staff at the town hall, including various ghosts haunting it, know nothing about the determined delinquent. "The Execution" (kul-ja! publishing, July 2024) by Peter Zemla is a Kafkaesque tumult between dream and reality, between outrageous tragedy and grotesque comedy. Told by death itself.

Both authors demonstrate an idiosyncratically poetic approach to death in their literature, in which gallows humor is of course not neglected. Writer, literary scholar and publisher Julia Kulewatz will host the evening.

Willi van Hengel was born on a Monday, on May 13, 1963 in Oberbruch on the Dutch border. He was fascinated by soccer and philosophy, Johan Cruyff, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. His first novel "Lucile" from 2006 is written from a woman's point of view. This was followed by the novel "Morbus vitalis" in 2008 and the poetry collection "Wunderblöcke", as he calls his lyrical prose miniatures, in 2010. In the meantime, he moved to Berlin's White Lake for love, where his two full-length plays "de Janeiro - ein Punk ertrinkt in Weißensee" (2018) and "flanzendörfer" (2021) were premiered in the immediate vicinity alongside several short plays. The novel "Dieudedet oder sowas wie eine Schneeflocke" was published in 2022 and the audio book "Wir werden über die Einfachheit unserer Liebe staunen" together with Magnus Tautz in 2024. Van Hengel earns his living as a lector in the German Bundestag.

Peter Zemla, born in Bamberg in 1964, now lives in Bayreuth. He has published prose and poetry in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including Lichtungen, Am Erker, Jahrbuch der Lyrik (2021, 2023, 2024) and WORTSCHAU. In 2017, Bayerischer Rundfunk produced and broadcast his radio play "Mein Bruder". In 2018, he was the town writer of Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm and nominated for the Dresden Poetry Prize. In 2020, his short story "Das Spielzeug" was awarded the Walter-Serner-Preis by rbb and the Literaturhaus Berlin.