Inside History: Reading and Conversation with Author Ingo Schulze
Oct 03, 2022 | 5:30pm PT | Tilden Room & Zoom
Lecture and Discussion at UC Berkeley & Virtual | Speaker: Ingo Schulze | Moderators: Deniz Göktürk (UC Berkeley) and Heike Friedman (GHI Washington, Pacific Office Berkeley)
This event is co-organized by the German Historical Institute Washington and the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley in partnership with the Institute of European Studies and the Goethe-Institut San Francisco. The event is generously supported by the German Consulate General San Francisco
The distinguished German writer Ingo Schulze will begin by reading from his story Das Deutschlandgerät. After the reading, Schulze will be joined in conversation by Deniz Göktürk (UC Berkeley) and Heike Friedman (GHI, Berkeley). In-person and online attendees will have the opportunity to pose questions. The event will be held in German, but questions may be submitted in English. The event will be held in the Tilden Room (5th Floor, Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union) on the UC Berkeley campus and will also be available for participants to participate virtually via Zoom.
Written between 2010 and 2016 and published in 2021 under the title Tasso im Irrenhaus, Das Deutschlandgerät refers to an installation built by Reinhard Mucha as Germany’s contribution to the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990. The name references a hydraulic mechanism used to put derailed trains back on track. In both Mucha’s installation and Schulze’s text, the machine serves as a cipher for the fractured German state. Schulze’s narrative follows the fictional character B.C., a writer who was forced to leave the GDR but was ultimately unable to find his place in West Germany. B.C. tries to continue publishing books about a country that has ceased to exist only to see his writing crumble in the process.
Ingo Schulze was born in Dresden in 1962 and lives in Berlin. His novel New Lives (2005) is widely regarded as the most important novel about German unification. His books have won numerous prizes and have been translated into thirty languages. His other books include: 33 Augenblicke des Glücks (1995), Simple Storys (1998), Handy (2007), Adam und Evelyn (2008), Peter Holtz – sein glückliches Leben erzählt von ihm selbst (2017), and Die rechtschaffenen Mörder (2020). The award-winning radio play based on Das Deutschlandgerät is available online. For further information on the author, see www.ingoschulze.com