WORDS LIKE FINE FABRIC: JUDITH SCHALANSKY AT THE “BERLINER GEGENWARTSLITERATUREN” AT VILLA OPPENHEIM

One day my best friend pressed an exceptionally beautiful Suhrkamp volume into my hand: Judith Schalansky’s “Verzeichnis einiger Verluste” – a mysteriously scribbled cover, black separating pages made of thick, open paper, printed with equally black, fine drawings on second glance. The smell of printer’s ink. Then I started reading and learned the following: Judith Schalansky uses words like weaving threads, condensing them sentence by sentence into a language so full of poetry and intensity that once you start it’s hard to put her texts down. The density of Schalansky’s language, its nostalgic feel, is carried by its content. In essay-like small forms, her “Verzeichnis einiger Verluste” (List of Some Losses) brings together precisely that: things past, lost, forgotten. Sappho’s poems, extinct tigers, the Palace of the Republic, sunken islands. Lost things, vanished things, ruins, libraries, feelings. Content and form are also held together by the design of the book. Judith Schalansky is also a book designer. Anyone who is now curious, or who loves Schalansky’s literature as much as I do, should immediately cancel everything tonight (07.12.23) and drive to Charlottenburg, where Schalansky is a guest at the discursive reading series “Berliner Gegenwartsliteraturen” at Villa Oppenheim, in which author Yael Inokai and literary critic Lara Sielmann regularly trace the themes and motifs of their guests in Berlin’s urban society and supplement them with auditory and visual elements. It is – of course – about the forgotten, as well as Schalansky’s essay “Schwankende Kanaren”, about city animals, oracles, climate change and social coexistence. And it would certainly be a loss to miss this evening.

Text: Hilka Dirks / Photos: Lilly Urbat / Credit: Villa Oppenheim

Villa Oppenheim, Schloßstr.55, 14059 Berlin–Charlottenburg; map
Berliner Gegenwartsliteraturen with Judith Schalansky Thu 07.12.2023 19h

@villaoppenheim