Why do we bother doing literature live? What’s the point of all these launches and festivals, symposiums and panels? They certainly don’t make economic sense in terms of ticketing and book sales. Most literary events rely on the unpaid blood, sweat, tears, favour-pulling, time and persistent social media spamming of various idealistic fools who, for whatever reason, are committed to yanking writers and readers away from their books and into town.
I know, because I’m one of those fools. I’ve done book launches for friends and strangers; I ran a The Berliner-Dussmann collab series; I’m part of a crew that puts on semi-regular events celebrating the legacies of dead German-language authors; and I’ve moderated panels at bookstores, art galleries, the Internationales Literaturfestival, and once even the annual Brigidsfest celebrating Irish female creativity (I suspect their first-choice host dropped out.) As of this summer, I’ll have co-organised or hosted or read at some 27 Berlin book events in the last four years.
the Down Under presence in Berlin is noted by anyone who enjoys Nick Cave or avocado toast or Berlin Atonal…
I understand that reading, like writing, is a private pursuit. But maybe privacy is overrated. In times like ours, it’s important to get these visceral reminders that there are others out there who share our anachronistic passion – and that’s especially true for people who aren’t in literary cliques. Literature, too, needs a public; we are all better off when that public is live and open to anyone. You never know who might stop by an event. And you never know what new author, book or idea you might discover by going along. Literary history is powered by chance encounters, and in Berlin, where so many international authors live in silos while writing for audiences back home, the potential is particularly high. This is why my favourite book events involve multiple writers. When I moderate these, I know the event is a success if something ignites between the authors – when they start talking across me, past me, over me, seeing their own concerns differently under the influence of somebody else.
Also in favour of book events: they’re fun! At least, I hope the events that I’m involved with are. That fun gets people in the doors; it also helps keep them from nodding off, as they might in those rather more pompous German book launches where a naturally shy author is forced to read aloud from their work for 20 minutes straight while various pensioners stare at the floor. But it also serves a purpose, which is to make the world of books – and of professional authors – just that little bit less forbidding. Literary events, as a writer recently said to me, are one of the last mystical social rituals we have left. They might not quite make sense – but they connect us with the past, and hopefully the future as well.
All of this has been going through my head as I work away on my 27th book event, the biggest one yet, which will take place later this month. For several years now, under the name PARATAXE, Martin Jankowski and Berliner Literarische Aktion have been running day-long festivals dedicated to different literary communities in Berlin (French, Latin American, Hebrew/Yiddish, Chinese). When Martin asked me to help put together a festival dedicated to the berlinisch literature of my native Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, I immediately agreed. Together, we’ve assembled a lineup of authors and translators with widely varying relationships to Berlin.
You never know what new author, book or idea you might discover by going along
Our first panel features people who work at the overlaps between German- and English-language cultures, like former The Berliner interviewees James Conway and Vijay Khurana. The second explores Berlin as an expatriate home-away-from-home, and in the third, we’ll hear from authors for whom Berlin has become a place to work through questions of migration, identity and cosmopolitanism. The showcase reading, hosted by American critic Lauren Oyler, will feature Berlinerinnen Madeleine Watts and Alice Miller as well as Mireille Juchau, a Sydney-based author whose work on Holocaust memory and family history has drawn her back to Berlin, the hometown of her Jewish grandmother.
The literature of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand is often overlooked on the world stage, but it is fascinating. And although the Down Under presence in Berlin is noted by anyone who enjoys Nick Cave or avocado toast or Berlin Atonal (or deals ketamine in Neukölln), one seldom finds explicit discussions about what this long-distance relationship means. I look forward to hearing what our guests make of the interplay of opposites, the myth-making that takes place between Old Europe and the New World – or, more recently, between sunny anglo suburbia and the radical thrill of Berlin counterculture.
No one answer will emerge from the festival, yet it is this exact plurality that excites me most about literary events. May 24 at Kesselhaus. Be there or be square.
- Antipodes: Down Under in Berlin, May 24, details
