Blind Spots in Shared Memory: Jenny Erpenbeck in Conversation with Lilla Balint and Kurt Beals

Zoom Registration

As one of the leading contemporary fiction writers in German, Jenny Erpenbeck’s literary oeuvre offers poetic engagements with Germany’s history in the long twentieth century. Born in East Berlin, she began publishing in 1999 and won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2001 for her short story “Sibirien,” (“Siberia”), later published in the collection Tand (2001; The Old Child and Other Stories). Her 2008 novel Heimsuchung (Visitation) relates the changing fate of a house, from the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich to post-wall Germany. Aller Tage Abend (2012; The End of Days), winner of the Hans Fallada Prize and the Foreign Independent Fiction Prize, follows the female protagonist’s life from a shtetl in today’s Poland to socialist East Berlin. Her novel Gehen, ging, gegangen (Go, Went, Gone), short-listed for the German Book Prize in 2018, revolves around the plight of African refugees in Berlin and puts the GDR experience in conversation with memories of German colonialism, and discourses on migration and borders in Europe. She recently published her novel Kairos (2021). Other works include: Dinge, die verschwinden (2009; ‘Things that Disappear’) and Kein Roman (2018; Not a Novel). Her works have been translated into thirty languages. Erpenbeck has also written and directed stage plays and collaborated on a number of opera productions.

Kurt Beals is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature and Director of Graduate Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley. His research focuses on experimental movements in 20th-century and contemporary German literature, including Dada, Concrete poetry, and digital poetry. Beals has translated a wide range of works from German into English. His translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s speech and essay collection Kein Roman (Not a Novel) is included in World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2020.

Lilla Balint is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary German literature, culture, and intellectual history in its transnational European contexts. She is currently at work on a monograph—tentatively entitled After 1989—that examines the aesthetics and modalities of historical representation after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her work appeared in Gegenwartsliteratur, The German Quarterly, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, and Die Wiederholung.