Ham.Lit

Unless of course you're in Hamburg or thereabouts and fancy a spot of youngish writing. In which case head over to the achingly named Ham.Lit next Thursday, 7 February, where you can wander between readings by Tina Uebel, Inger-Maria Mahlke, Sascha Reh, Frank Spilker, Monika Zeiner, Björn Kuhligk, Tilman Rammstedt, Kevin Kuhn, Matthias Nawrat, Silke Scheuermann, Daniela Chmelik,  Friederike Gräff, Simone Kornappel and Kerstin Preiwuß. I've been twice and had a good time both times, except that it's on a Thursday so it doesn't quite go on for long enough, especially because it's in this night club place that makes you feel like getting drunk and depraved.

no man's land Events

no man’s land in Hamburg: sailing on The Story Boat
8 pm – 11pm,  Friday, 25th November
Centro Sociale, Sternstraße 2, Hamburg-Sternschanze (U-Bahn: Feldstraße)

In a Hamburg first, The Story Boat is hosting no man’s land, the online magazine for new German literature in translation. With translators Mark Terrill and Henry Holland and work by Jörg Fauser, Peter Rühmkorf, Christine Marendon and Mirko Bonné.

no man's land # 6 launch reading
November 28, 8 p.m.
Saint Georges Bookshop
Wörther Str. 27, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg
with Zehra Çirak, Michael Roes and Daniela Seel.
no man's land launches Issue # 6 with a bilingual reading featuring authors Zehra Çirak, Michael Roes and Daniela Seel. Zehra Çirak holds the prestigious Chamisso Prize for writing in German as a second language, along with numerous other awards. One of Germany's leading "poets of the foreign", Michael Roes is a novelist, poet, anthropologist and filmmaker. Daniela Seel, publisher of Berlin's legendary KookBooks, is also an accomplished experimental poet.

Tonight's authors reflect the range of an issue that also includes poetry by Lars-Arvid Brischke, Dieter M. Gräf, Christine Marendon, Monika Rinck, Peter Rühmkorf, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Donna Stonecipher and Jan Wagner and fiction by Eleonore Frey, Michael Lentz, Eva Menasse, Lutz Seiler and Keto von Waberer, and a documentation of Ann Cotten's and Monika Rinck's performance "The Igel Flies Tonight". Issue # 6 will appear November 28 at www.no-mans-land.org.

As usual, drinks will be available from the Saint Georges bar, and you are welcome to linger, chat and celebrate with us after the reading!

DIY Anti-Nuclear Litfest in Hamburg

Sponsoring is a tricky subject. There's only so much you can organise without paying people, and corporate sponsoring can be one way to pay writers and employees at literary festivals. Or indeed to pay award-winners a sum of money, as with the Best Translated Book Award, which is underwritten by Amazon. In this case, the sponsor gets the tax benefits, the feeling of supporting international literature above and beyond their own efforts, and the positive publicity. Plus of course the negative publicity after Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson called for a boycott.

In Hamburg, people are angry about the energy giant Vattenfall's sponsoring of a local literary festival. A group of activists, writers, publishers, translators and other cultural bods came up with the idea of staging their own alternative festival. Here's part of their original statement (in my translation):

We have nothing against reading festivals. We have no desire to demonise a well organised literary festival simply because the organisers are trying to cover the costs with sponsoring. That is not the case here, though. In 2006 Vattenfall took over as sponsor of the "Hamburger Lesetage" (...). As is now unfortunately all too common in the field of sponsoring, the energy conglomerate is no longer presenting itself as a mere supporter of the literary event. Instead, the company holds the rights to the name and is allowed to call itself the "initiator, sponsor and organiser", thereby branding itself as culturally affine, as it is known nowadays. So that it does not blend into the background, since 2010 every writer is looked after by a "Vattenfall mentor" – a company employee who "introduces the author to the audience". The aim is for the company name and the cultural event to meld into a single brand – and the media are going along with it all too willingly: we can read the name "Vattenfall Lesetage" all over the place. We are supposed to link the event with the name of the company as often as possible and without even thinking. Vattenfall, Vattenfall, Vattenfall.

Said company is currently in the process of re-opening a dodgy nuclear power station and is a major player in the German nuclear power lobby.

So, the good people of Hamburg are organising readings during the same week as the corporate festival - with a number of interesting people on the bill - and encouraging people to change their electricity company at the same time. All under the name of "Lesetage selber machen - Vattenfall Tschüss sagen" (DIY Litfest - Say Bye Bye to Vattenfall). I like it.

Glam.Lit

Berlin is famous for being a bit of a scruffy kind of place. A city where you can venture out to the shops with your pyjamas under your coat and no make-up on, and nobody will look askance. There's a good side to that - there are times when you just really need caffeine and there's no time to take a shower and wash and blow-dry and apply lip gloss. But then there's a bad side as well, which is that when you do want to dress up you tend to stand out like a sore thumb - an utterly gorgeous and glamorous sore thumb, but an injured digit nonetheless.

So I enjoy the occasional foray into distant territory - and on Thursday that was Hamburg! Home of the wondrous festival by the slightly embarrassing name of Ham.Lit. Or as they put it, a concentrated shot of the most exciting young German literature and music right now, on one night and under one roof. Fifteen "young" writers and two sets of music. What better opportunity, I asked myself, to get totally glammed up with my Hamburg girlfriends Isa and the West-Eastern Diva? So there we all were, the belles of the ballroom, only of course we'd forgotten that the place is completely underlit. So our pulchritude went unnoticed.

No matter. For in the dark cavern of a former WWII bunker, we saw some great readings. My personal line-up went like this: Mariana Leky (read beautifully despite a bad back and a rather strenuous moderator), Kathrin Seddig (my absolute highlight; I shall be reading her book Runterkommen), Peggy Mädler (who did very well for what was apparently her first reading, and did rather intrigue me), Hannes Köhler (distracting facial hair, nice piece of writing set in Berlin), and then a guy called Tino Hanekamp. Tino Hanekamp kindly stepped in at the last minute because someone else was ill. And he's also got a book coming out soon.
There are times when I say, "Believe the hype!" This is not one of them. But at least it gave us all something to bitch about afterwards. I'm told Thomas Pletzinger and Jochen Schmidt were excellent too.

Then there was music, of the listen carefully to the lyrics kind. Sadly, I don't like listening carefully to lyrics, so we went somewhere else where people appreciated our fabulous get-up.

Ham.Lit is a great little festival, very tightly organised and with an excellent selection of writers to choose from. If you're interested in emerging German writers, it's a perfect opportunity to get a taste of the latest stuff on offer. But don't worry about what you wear - pyjamas under your coat will do just fine.

Hamburg's Finest: Ham.Lit & Die Vorleser

There's more than one way to skin a cat. You can go out into the world and listen to writers in cavernous bunkers, or you can listen to people talking about books from the comfort of your own sofa. Ham.Lit was the excruciating title of an impressive event in Hamburg on Thursday, "a concentrate of the most exciting young German-language literature and music of the moment - on one night, under one roof."

And what a roof. Hamburg had decided to veil itself in mist for my visit, with a huge five-storey WWII bunker rising like an icebreaker between the snowy pavements. In we ventured, then up to the fourth floor in a lift crowded with hip young things. There were three venues hosting 18 writers plus two bands. Which meant that inevitably, one was constantly torn between poetry and prose, slam and short stories.

The hugely talented, heavily bearded Finn-Ole Heinrich opened the show with a humdinger, his knockout story "Zeit der Witze" - best of the night, said my delightful hostess Isa, and I agree. Plus the guy sure knows how to read - I'd have given him a later slot myself. Then came Kristof Magnusson with a nice taste of his novel Das war ich nicht (see my review). I stayed put for Jan Wagner, who once again struck fear into my heart with his sheer intelligence and genuinely enjoyable poetry. In contrast to Daniel Falb, who struck fear of a different kind into my heart. Back to Clemens Meyer, with a nervous rendering from his forthcoming diary-like Gewalten. It looks like it'll be a personal, political, very strange look back at 2009.

By that point I was exhausted, so Tilmann Rammstedt and Monica Rinck sadly went in one ear and out the other. And that's the only disadvantage to these huge events: sheer input overload. There were a hell of a lot of people there, many of whom wandered in and out of the venues, which doesn't make for concentrated listening either. And the crowd thinned out rapidly as the last trains left before the second band - the impressive GUSTAV - came on stage (I missed the first musical act but was briefly serenaded in the corridor to make up for it). Despite that, the event was a huge success and a great opportunity for Hamburgers to pick up on some very happening and talented writers. My radical suggestion for next time: don't hold it on a week night.

Those Hamburgers, I noticed, are quite different to the Berliners: completely and utterly laid-back. Presumably it was the Hamburgers who inspired that song telling Aurélie that the Germans flirt very subtly. Or maybe it was just too dark. And it's Hamburgers who make up the studio audience for ZDF's televisual literary extravaganza, Die Vorleser - including my delightful hostess Isa and the lovely Axel in yesterday's episode. You too can watch it online via that link.

I've mentioned it in the past, but this was the first time I'd got round to watching it. And I'm undecided - does the information value outweigh the irritation factor? Or to put it another way - does Ijoma Mangold outweigh Amelie Fried and, in this case, a barely comprehensible Detlev Buck? Mangold, for me, is the opposite of his fellow critic Sigrid Löffler - in the former case I want not to like him but can never quite manage. He says such a lot of clever things that I just can't help respecting him. Unfortunately, the show is done in such an irritating way that whenever anyone else is on camera I start gnashing my teeth.

It's obviously scripted, but the makers expect us to suspend our disbelief and buy the idea of Ijoma and Amelie chatting informally on the sofa. "So you want me to explain the title now, don't you, Ijoma?" tweets Amelie, and Ijoma nods as if he really, genuinely does. "Oh, you critics!" twitters Amelie, and Ijoma smirks as if he hadn't seen it coming. "I have adolescent kids!" squeaks Amelie, and we all try hard not to imagine what they get up to behind mum's back, while sighing over her all-too obvious appeal to the female book-buying demographic.

In between, Ijoma gets to enthuse over a couple of books, while Amelie looks mature and disapproving. All padded out with shots of the laid-back Hanseatic audience frowning. I don't know, it's better than Richard and Judy - but great telly it ain't.