Programme

_18.00_Focus Africa
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Seitenbühne

Climate Change and Africa. “Hotspots”. A documentary by Marc Engelhardt on behalf of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (2007/25 minutes)
No continent is as affected by climate change as Africa. Irregular rain, floods, droughts and increasing desertification have already thoroughly changed the continent. The Kenyan ecologist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai started the call for “Africa’s voices against climate change”. From the Sahara in the west to the Ethiopian Highlands of the east, the film “Hotspots” documents the dedication of the project’s participants.
Concluding:
“Boiling Point”: Climate Change in South Africa. Barbara Unmüßig discusses with Leonie Joubert (South Africa)
The renowned scientific journalist Leonie Joubert has specialised in climate change, agriculture and energy. In her publication “Boiling Point”, she investigates the signs of climate change in South Africa, using a rooibos tea farmer, fisher, corn farmer, politician and a medicine woman as examples.
In cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation

_18.00_kaleidoscope
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer

Connie Palmen (Netherlands)
Presented by: Gabriele von Arnim
„There is something strange about this death“. – Connie Palmen’s most recent novel, “Luzifer”, takes a true event as its starting point: the unexplained death of Marina Schaper, the partner of composer Peter Schat, in July 1985. The couple Lucas Loos and Clara Wevers take a vacation to Greece in order to try to save their broken marriage. Then Clara, drunk, tumbles over a railing to her death. The author doesn’t make clear whether it was suicide or murder. The focus is rather on how Lucas and the friends of the couple deal with the news of Clara’s death and how they mourn. Palmen probes the chasms of the human soul without jumping to conclusions or making moral judgements.

_19.00_speak, memory
Literaturhaus | Großer Saal

Friedrich Gorenstein: Psalm
Presented by: Yury Veksler
Reader: Susanna Kraus
“People always beg in Christ’s name, if merely for the reason that nothing else has been devised for the beggar, since a beggar who has always been on the lowest step of society can only use the absolute highest essence to make a living [...] Who on earth would come up with the idea to beg in the name of the superintendant’s assistant...?” Gorensteil (born in Kiev in 1932, died in Berlin in 2002) is an obelisk which penetrates our world like a message from another – an obelisk whose golden point the sun’s rays hit before they do us.

_19.15_Focus Africa
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer

Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone/United Kingdom)
Presented by: Bernhard Robben
Reader: Eleonore Weisgerber
It starts with a letter: "The coffee plantation at Rofathane is yours. ’O yi di’. It is there“ In her much acclaimed first novel "Ancestor Stones" Aminatta Forna portrays the life of four extremely different women who were married to the same man, namely the grandfather of the narrator. In a powerful, colourful and poetic manner Forna tells us about the life of these women und about the dwindling of a spiritual world.

_19.30_scritture giovani
Münzsalon

Scritture Giovani II
Presented by: Tilman Rammstedt
Speaker: Alexandra Kamp
In the film “Sunshine” by Danny Boyle, the crew of Icarus II rush to help a dying sun. This year’s “Scritture Giovani” – the traditional cooperation between three international literature festivals – sees four young European authors exposing themselves to the light of the sun: “Sunshine” is the title of the anthology that accompanies the project, in which four of the authors’ short stories are published for the first time. This evening Thomas von Steinaecker (Germany) presents his text “Patricia, Patricia“, Giovanni Montanero (Italy) reads “Your Light”. All four authors will participate in the final discussion
Part 1 of the reading on 3.10. at 19.30

_19:00_kaleidoscope
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Große Bühne

Eliot Weinberger in conversation with Ha Jin (China/USA)
Reader: Frank Arnold
New home: for the first time prize-winning author Ha Jin chose the USA as the backdrop for a novel. In “A Free Life” (the German translation will be published this coming spring) Ha Jin tells of the Wu family, which emigrated to the U.S. to begin a new life after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In unadorned language, stripped of kitsch and false pathos, Ha Jin follows the Wus’ journey, in which they come up against obstacles but still optimistically embrace the possibilities that America offers them.

_20.00_kaleidoscope
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Seitenbühne

Scenic Reading: „Hilda“ by Marie NDiaye (France)
Abok Ensemble with: Miriam Goldschmidt, Dorothée Reinoss, Nino Sandow
Direction: Philippa Ebéné
Madame Lemarchand is looking for a servant girl. She meets a girl named “Hilda”, who arouses her highest expectations. Madame desires more from Hilda than the common household chores. She wants to possess the young girl’s trust and friendship. She also pays for it. Franck, Hilda’s husband, gets involved with the business. A fierce power game revolving around money, prestige and personal fulfilment begins. With irony and a sharp wit, Marie NDiaye comments on the relationship between North and South, the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless, the ruling and the ruled.

_20.00_kaleidoscope
Akademie der Künste (Pariser Platz) | Plenarsaal

Ingo Schulze (Germany)
Presented by: Lothar Müller
The plot of “Adam und Evelyn“ takes place in the late summer of 1989, so shortly before the the reunification of Germany which was described so outstandingly by Ingo Schulze in his novel “New Lives” (2005). But this time the author doesn’t bring his characters together in East Germany, but rather in Hungary, on the shores of Lake Balaton. The women love Adam because he makes them clothes; Adam loves beautiful women, especially when they wear his clothes. Above all he loves Evelyn, though she has just discovered his tricks. She leaves without him, he follows her to Hungary, where the border has just been opened. In this exceptional situation, Ingo Schulze examines the myth of Adam and Eve. A grandiose tragi-comedy comes about, dealing with prohibition and temptation, love and acceptance.
In cooperation with the Akademie der Künste
Entrance € 5/3

_20.30_kaleidoscope
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Foyer

Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria)
Presented by: Knut Elstermann
Speaker: Kathleen Gallego Zapata
Georgi Gospodinov's "Natural Novel", published in German in 2007, is an astounding novel full of digressions around a case of adultery. Stylistically witty, without appearing like dry routine, the narrator tries to render a novel as natural as every day life. Or a book that consists only of beginnings (and each time starts anew after page 17). Or verbs for that matter. The author also presents two pieces of prose as short as they are bizarre, "A fly in the urinal" and "First steps".

_21.30_specials
Haus der Berliner Festspiele | Seitenbühne

Chorika+ (Greece)
“Choriká“ is the title of Stavros Zafeiriou’s poetic composition, which underlies this genre-crossing performance. Visually adapted by Stavros Panagiotakis and interpreted live through music and dance (composer: Perikles Douvitsas), the meaning of the texts expands. They will be read in Greek and in German translation. Space and its maintenance through people is the thematic framework of her composition – from the Biblical creation story, through the times of myth and history, up to the theory of relativity, the Kafkaesque landscapes and modern city planning.
In cooperation with the Salonika Prefecture and the Greek Cultural Foundation Berlin