There can be no end for the time being, when everything has only just begun.

And so they finally went into the open, provisionally, with "Angry Pop Music" from Münster.

Outside, freedom of expression spread its wings as a “canary in the shaft of democracy” over the Kreuzberg ballroom.

Everything went well again!

Icy cold penetrated the cracks in the brick buildings along the banks of the Spree and the Landwehr Canal.

Muff Potter crowned the first PEN Berlin Congress with a concert on Friday.

"The only reason to leave home is to change the world," says a song from her new record.

And that is exactly what the founding members of PEN Berlin, Deniz Yücel and Eva Menasse, were committed to when they made freedom of expression the main protagonist of their first public company report.

Just as the canary is the first to notice the dangerous, because odorless, carbon monoxide in the tunnel, freedom of expression is the first to be affected by anti-democratic tendencies.

Unlike the canary, she doesn't fall dead off the perch, but has to consult with herself.

Meaning, Purpose, Truth: Cornerstones of critical thinking that increasingly show cracks - cracks in the foundation of opinion formation.

With the finding that freedom of expression has also sometimes gotten into a paralyzing atmosphere in Western democracies, the organizers drew a bow from their welcome address to the brilliant closing speech of PEN America President Ayad Akhtar, who castigated the "intellectual tribalism" of standard-bearers of identity politics ( FAZ from December 2nd).

The new PEN is confusingly similar to the old one in terms of its statutes, but it is younger, more female and more migrant, said Eva Menasse.

You could see that for yourself on Friday.

With attractive matter-of-factness, the Israeli Tomer Gardi discussed "Violence, Memory, Literature" with the authors Khuê Pham, Meral Şimşek and Ursula Krechel in his now award-winning Broken German on a podium in Kreuzberg.

Khuê Pham, born in 1982, comes from a family that was so badly traumatized by the Vietnam War that she could hardly speak about what she had experienced. Only her daughter, who was born in Germany, was able to do this: "Displace water, that leads to waves." The Kurd Meral Şimşek has just escaped persecution in Turkey by fleeing to Germany with the help of PEN Berlin.

This roundtable discussion on literary cultures of remembrance was hosted by Michel Friedman, who himself has just published an autobiographical book in which he reflects on his role as a child of Holocaust survivors: “I was born in a cemetery.

My parents were the cemetery attendants, I was their youngest apprentice.” The memory of violence as a narration deposited in literature: It was the Jew Tomer Gardi of all people who, as a reply to Friedman’s invocation of the literary repository of evidence for later moral processes, represented the vision that everything could also flourish differently.

In a literary landscape, for example, in which the role of victim is “less desirable” among the public.

Intellectuals of all origins living in Germany

During its first tour of the workshop, PEN Berlin showed itself to be sympathetically committed and stimulatingly open to discussion.

Anyone who has looked around a little under the spotlights and in the blind corners of the concert hall will have noticed that the PEN Berlin is completely inadequately described as a defiant reaction to the Darmstadt Alt-Verein.

On Friday, the troop of journalists and authors gathered in Kreuzberg had their very own tinsel effect.

Intellectuals of all origins, skin colors, genders, ages and styles living in Germany were able to meet in the Berlin subculture and on the basis of their autobiographical facts, which often have to do with migration.

Together they gave a coherent picture - on a cold December day in 2022,