Anyone who ventures into a trading exchange should not be afraid to act.
But what are writers doing there?
Debate.
A category mistake, but an aesthetically justifiable one, because the Old Stock Exchange in Leipzig is the most beautiful event hall in the city: pure baroque, on the upper floor an auditorium with windows all around as a monstrance of activity.
And on the forecourt Goethe in Erz. Where else could the German Academy for Language and Poetry have set up its new discussion format “Leipzig Debate on Literature” more attractively?
For this annual program item of a popularization offensive desired by the sponsors of the Academy (which also includes the autumn "Frankfurt Debate on Language"), the best architectural and topographical most central thing that Leipzig has to offer is
And of course only the best that the academy itself has to offer: personalities.
At the first Leipzig debate in front of an audience - the pandemic had thwarted the start planned for 2020, and a year later it was only possible via stream - the academics Judith Schalansky, Anja Utler, Marion Poschmann, Marcel Beyer and Michael Hagner together with their as President Ernst Osterkamp acted as the moderator, as well as three external interlocutors: the publisher Andreas Rötzer, the publicist Marie Luise Knott and the literary scholar Tanja von Hoorn. Together with the second moderator of the evening, the Germanist Frieder von Ammon, who teaches in Leipzig, the number of participants was ten – an interesting proof of the natural superiority of the decimal system, but counterproductive given the topic at hand:
"Questions on Literature in the Age of the Anthropocene".
The latter has already lasted (depending on the destination) one hundred to two hundred years, but the Leipzig event was limited to 150 minutes (including two greetings and a half-hour break), and since the neighboring town hall clock unmistakably documented the passage of time, both moderators relied on absolute punctuality .
Literature obliges: for whom the hour strikes.
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Both moderators rely on absolute punctuality.
Literature obliges: for whom the hour strikes.
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Both moderators rely on absolute punctuality.
Literature obliges: for whom the hour strikes.
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As a result, Judith Schalansky's outcry, "How, now?" at the end of her discussion block became the most passionate sentence of the evening, while the prospects of human-induced biodiversity, climate catastrophe and landscape degradation unleashed far less violent feelings.
Rather, the tenfold joy in the virtual nature reserve, which literature has in store with its descriptions of the lost, was so great that "wonderful" became the most used word of the evening, ahead of Hagner's inflationary use of "um" and "so".
Too often the same phrases from too many guests: These Leipzig anthropoteen themselves represented a waste of resources. “So far.
Will be continued," said Ernst Osterkamp at the end of the start of the Leipzig debate series.
Yes,