Lesung mit Paula Fürstenberg: Weltalltage: Tränen, Trauma und Tomatensuppe, 2024

In the organizer's words:

Paula Fürstenberg: Space Days: Tears, Trauma and Tomato Soup, 2024

The current exhibition IM DIALOG - Hasso Plattner Collection: Art from the GDR is accompanied by monthly readings that invite visitors to engage in a literary examination of the GDR and its critical reflection in the present.

Following on from the exhibition's idea of bringing works by GDR artists into a dialog and illuminating different perspectives, authors provide literary impulses, explore new narratives and place the stories about the GDR in a contemporary context.

In her novel, Paula Fürstenberg explores the complex dynamics of a friendship in an East German context.
The GDR, which the author herself did not consciously experience, nevertheless remains a formative "blank space" - an absence that comes to life through fragments of memory and anecdotes.

The characters: the budding architect Max and the narrator, a writer who has been chronically ill since childhood, wrestle with the after-effects of the GDR past. While Max deals academically with the achievements of GDR architecture, the narrator reflects on stereotyped perceptions and her own questions of identity. She tells her own story, and thus also Max's, from her post-reunification childhood in the East to the fluctuating present.

In Weltalltage, Paula Fürstenberg tells the story of a special friendship and its ordeal with warmth, force and humor. About what it means not to function in a world where everything has to work; about the body and how we deal with it; about the power of words and about where empathy begins - and where it has to end. (Publisher Kiepenheuer and Witsch )

The author will read from her book at Café Hedwig and talk with Maria-Christina Piwowarski about related topics such as the actualization of the use of language about bodies and the views of a post-reunification generation.

Price information:

10 euros plus admission The event ticket includes a visit to the exhibition from 5 pm.