Reading and discussion with Michael Krüger (author and publisher) and Prof. Dr. Detlev Schöttker (Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research).
Until the early 1930s, the neighbourhood around Berlin’s Fasanenstraße was home to numerous authors and artists who shaped the city’s cultural life. Following the Nazi regime’s rise to power, many of them were persecuted and forced into exile. Their works recount the biographical and political upheavals since 1933, as well as encounters, friendships and new experiences.
Michael Krüger and Prof. Dr Detlev Schöttker will introduce some of these figures, including Max Hermann-Neiße, George Grosz, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Mascha Kaléko and Else Lasker-Schüler.
Combining biographical facts, historical images and literary texts, the event paints a multifaceted picture of cultural life around Fasanenstraße. The title of the evening is taken from Max Hermann-Neiße’s poem ‘Verdammnis 1933’ and refers to the fact that, even in the midst of a period of cultural flourishing, some could already sense the impending destruction.
Michael Krüger is a writer, poet, translator and publisher. For decades, as director of Hanser Verlag in Munich, he shaped Germany’s literary life. His own body of work comprises numerous volumes of poetry, works of fiction and essays on literary culture. He now lives on Fasanenstraße and has dedicated a cycle of poems to it, linking him personally to the place and its literary tradition.
Professor Detlev Schöttker is a scholar of literature and media studies. He taught modern German literature at Humboldt University in Berlin and is a Senior Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL). His research focuses on the literature and culture of modernism, including the works of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Jünger. He has published several articles in the newspaper FAZ on the history and networks of aesthetic modernism centred around Fasanenplatz.