Speak, Memory

_19.30_speak, memory
Literaturhaus | Großer Saal

Aimé Césaire: A Season in the Congo. A play about Patrice Lumumba and Return to my Native Land
Introduction: Anna Katharina Neufeld
Reader: Astrid Gorvin
André Breton judged Aimé Césaire’s “Return to my Native Land“ (1939) to be ”the greatest poetic monument of our time“. In 1965 Césaire – politician and founder of the négritude movement one of the 20th century’s most influential black poets – wrote a play, “black, political theatre”, as he said himself, about a freedom fighter who lost more than one battle. He wrote about the failure of independence, about the first Congolese prime minister who was assassinated in 1961.

_21.30_speak, memory
Literaturhaus | Großer Saal

Naguib Mahfuz: Children of Gebelawi
Introduction: Anna Katharina Neufeld
Reader: Frank Arnold
”The story perhaps originated in dreams and desires. Be that as it may [...] There are so many motives for recounting the history of our area!” In “Children of Gebelawi”, the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfuz (1911-2006) forges his own narrative style, which can be read as a parable of human history. The novel is controversial, publishing was stopped, and the work, which appeared for the first time in 1959, was only published in Arabic in 2006.