Language as identity. Language as resistance. Language as emancipation. Language as home. An artistic home, too. But what if one has to leave one’s home?
In 1940, the poet and Jewish woman Nelly Sachs escaped from Berlin to Stockholm at the very last moment. Peter Weiss arrived in the Swedish capital that same year. For both of them, the German language was also an artistic home. How did they relate to their mother tongue while in Swedish exile?
And, what if one first has to leave everything behind in order to give one’s mother tongue a home at all? The Kurdish diaspora in Sweden has made major contributions to the Kurdish language and literature. Here, Kurdish authors in exile created a modern Kurdish literary language. The world’s first Kurdish Library was established there.
Questions of language and the feeling of speechlessness play a crucial role in experiences of exile. In conversation with Grit Thunemann, the authors Aris Fioretos and Deniz Utlu connect historical stories of exile with more recent experiences of language in exile.
The event is being held in cooperation with the Embassy of Sweden and is part of the Embassies of Exile series, in which the Exilmuseum collaborates with embassy representatives and cultural institutions around the world. The evening will open with Veronika Wand-Danielsson, Swedish Ambassador to Germany, and Christina Beinhoff, Special Representative of the Federal Foreign Office.
Aris Fioretos is a Swedish writer of Greek-Austrian descent. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He regularly writes for the arts and culture section of Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter , and has received numerous awards, most recently the Swedish Academy’s Essay Prize and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He has been a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin, since 2022. Fioretos lives and works in Stockholm and Greece.
Deniz Utlu is a German writer. From 2003 to 2014, he edited the culture and society magazine freitext . From 2017 to 2019, he wrote the column Entries in the Logbook for Der Tagesspiegel. His third novel, Vaters Meer (2023), was awarded the Special Prize of the European Union Prize for Literature. Utlu conducts research at the German Institute for Human Rights and hosts the literary series Prosa der Verhältnisse at the Maxim Gorki Theatre. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Alfred Döblin Prize and the Literature Prize of the City of Hanover. He researches the experiences of the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden.
Grit Thunemann works as a cultural affairs officer and interpreter/translator at the Embassy of Sweden in Berlin. As part of her work, she regularly presents new literature from Sweden in readings and conversations with authors.
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