Schedule:

6 pm: Friendly Soup created by and featuring Freundliche Mitte

7 pm Interspeeches 4 – European Ängst: featuring Max Czollek and Fiston Mwanza Mujila Host: Florian Kessler

Admission: € 6/€ 4/€ 4 for Interspeeches 4 – European Ängst: featuring Max Czollek and Fiston Mwanza Mujila please register via ticket-link.

Free admission for Friendly Soup. Please register via ticket-link.

In the summer of 2018, the writers’ collective Nazis & Goldmund organised a conference in Berlin entitled Ängst is now a Weltanschauung, that focused on the erosion of democracy. Colleagues from literature and other fields of art came together to create a space for reflection. Their aim was to phrase a straightforward plea against the normalisation of nationalist, illiberal, neo-Nazist tendencies, but also to find positive visions for society and the future of the entire planet. Nazis & Goldmund now go on to continue this engagement in Vienna: On four occasions, Nazis & Goldmund will call for an open plenary sitting at studio brut together with various other platforms in order to devise potential narratives of a pluralistic society based on artistic and academic inputs, to debate and to elaborate strategies.

The fourth instalment of Interspeeches is entitled European Ängst. Based on inputs from authors Fiston Mwanza Mujila and Max Czollek, it deals with what is attributed and inherent to us, with memory theatre and with alternatives to our so-called concept of Leitkultur.

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, born in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1981, lives in Graz, where he was the resident writer of the 2009/10 season. He writes poetry, prose and drama and teaches African literature at the University of Graz. Tram 83 (Zsolnay, 2016) is his first novel, for which he received numerous awards, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s 2017 Award for Translated Contemporary Literatures. His play, Zu der Zeit der Königinmutter (“At the time of the Queen mother”) had its world premiere at Akademietheater in Vienna in February 2019.

Max Czollek was born in Berlin in 1987 and has lived there ever since. Until 2006, he attended the Berlin Jewish School, afterwards he went on to study political science at TU Berlin, graduating with a doctorate from the Centre for Research on Antisemitism. In 2016, he curated an event on “Disintegration. A Congress of Contemporary Jewish Positions” with Sasha Marianna Salzmann. Since 2009, he has been a member of the poetry collective G13 and a curator of the international poetry projects Babelsprech as well as one of the co-editors of the German magazine Jalta – Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart (“Positions on the Jewish Present”). Verlagshaus Berlin has so far published two volumes of his poetry, Druckkammern (2012) and Jubeljahre (2015) (“Pressure chambers” and “Blue moon”). In 2018, Desintegriert euch! (“Un-integrate!”) was published by Hanser Verlag.