2024-03-19 18:00:00
“Leipzig reads” is one of the largest reading festivals in the world. 2,500 events with around 2,900 participants – an entire city and surrounding area in reading fever. A few very personal tips through the reading jungle.
Leipzig reads.
The Leipzig Book Fair is primarily a public fair, not least because of the gigantic reading festival “Leipzig Reads”. There’s hardly anything that doesn’t exist at “Leipzig reads”. You can read and have people read, experience discussion groups, concerts and exhibitions. A few not arbitrary, but very subjectively selected tips for inspiration:
“Leipzig reads” begins before the official start of the book fair. One of the most popular events every year is the Book Fair Poetry Slam in Hall A of Plant 2. Some of Germany’s best poetry slammers meet here on Wednesday from 7:30 p.m. This time: Nicolaus Straatmann, Alina Schmolke, Marie Gdaniec, Aidim Halimi, Sebastian23, Helena, Inke Sommerlang and Birdy.
This year’s book fair guest countries are the Netherlands and Flanders, whose literature will be presented at many events. Also on Wednesday, 7 p.m. in the Schaubühne Lindenfels, several Dutch authors will be competing under the very contemporary title “Imagine if you could end the war with a dance” – based on a sentence by Pina Bausch: “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost” – an “evening between East and West”.
Peter Wensierski will present a tragic Eastern story on Thursday at 6 p.m. in the museum in the “Round Corner”. In the book “The Last Journey of Matthias Domaschk”, published by Christoph-Links-Verlag, the author investigated the still unexplained death of the civil rights activist Domaschk in Stasi detention in Gera. Long-time Spiegel editor Peter Wensierski tells of a generation of young people looking for a free, self-determined life.
For friends of both bound and unbound verse, the poetry bookstore in the KUB gallery on Kantstrasse offers new things from the poets’ workshops of around 30 authors for three days, Wednesday to Friday from 8 p.m. Many of them are still to be discovered. Frank Witzel will also be presenting discoveries on Thursday, 10:50 a.m., at the ARD, ZDF and 3sat exhibition stand on the exhibition grounds. In “My Literary History of the 20th Century”, the renowned author dedicates himself to works, according to the publisher’s announcement, by “unsuccessful, obsessed, failed and completely unknown authors. As if incidentally, in this very personal canon a poetics of the literary world and its ironies, silliness, disappointed hopes and great expectations, which also allows a look into the abyss of the writing room.”
Also on the exhibition grounds, in the Non-Fiction Book Forum, on Thursday at 11.30 a.m., Klaus-Rüdiger Mai will present his clever but also critical portrait of Sahra Wagenknecht under the title “The Communist”. She is considered an “Eastern expert” – like Julia Finkernagel in another way. The well-traveled backpack journalist will read from her book with the handy title “Eastward – Or how to eat soup with your hands without having to change afterwards” on Thursday at 7 p.m. in the “Alte Latinschule” library in Delitzsch. Among other things, she explores vital questions such as “What does Georgian hospitality mean for the liver? What is it like to almost be run over by Peter Maffay in Romania or to camp with a fearsome Cossack in Russia?”
The Contemporary History Forum on Thursday at 9 p.m. will be about “Deals with Dictators. A Different History of the Federal Republic”, in which author Frank Bösch describes, in a well-researched manner, that the Federal Republic had few scruples with right-wing generals, communist leaders or autocrats in developing countries Doing business of various kinds.
Also very current: On Friday, 7 p.m., Christine Knödler and Martin Schäuble will be in the Arowitsch House with the book “The History of the Israelis and the Palestinians”, the “standard work on the Middle East conflict from the founding of the state to the Hamas attack”, as the Carl Hanser publishing house announces that there is “not one valid truth” in this conflict.
You can meet a good friend from Chemnitz on Friday, 7 p.m., in the Könitz Gallery: Under the title “The Seven Lives of Stefan Heym”, Gerald Richter and the artist Marian Kretzschmer portray Heym as a “beacon of civil courage” in a graphic novel “a time full of upheavals” come to life.
Angela Krauß, who comes from Chemnitz, has big plans. In “The world building must be built. You want to live somewhere” on Saturday, 7 p.m., in the Museum of Fine Arts, the poet designs her very own house with living rooms, children’s rooms and back rooms in which people can live.
There would certainly be room for weirdos there too – under the motto “What weirdos!” On Saturday, 7.30 p.m., the Eichenspinner Verlag will bring readings, concerts and literary quizzes to the stage in the Pöge House, including with Hans Brinkmann, Ulrike Brummert, Wolfram Ette and the band Sicher from Chemnitz.
Anyone who feels like singing afterwards is in good hands with the Book Fair Choir on Sunday at 2 p.m. In the glass hall, trade fair visitors who love to sing, supported by the MDR broadcast choir under the direction of Julia Selina Blank and accompanied by the drummer Vivi Vassileva, meet to sing together.
- More reading comfort even on the go
- E-paper and news in one app
- Push notifications throughout the day
No thanks. Continue in this view.
#Discoveries #Leipzig #Book #Fair