Judith Hermann is giving the traditional poetics lecture at Frankfurt’s Goethe University this year. At the beginning it was about the autobiographical core in fictional storytelling.
With a truly poetic poetry lecture, Judith Hermann at Frankfurt’s Goethe University brought the traditional series back to life after the Corona break.
The Berlin author dedicated the first lecture (“Summer house, later”, most recently: “Daheim”) on Tuesday evening to the autobiographical core in fictional storytelling.
“I write about my own life. I don’t know any other way of writing,” said the author, who was born in 1970, at the beginning of her lecture, in which she talked about her former psychoanalyst, a former friend with the same psychoanalyst and the clique they shared at that time. All of these people appear in her books but are different from real life: “The story is a shelter for the narrator. A shell like the shell of a nut. The narrator is the smallest doll in the Russian Matryoshka, the story is the cocoon around them around.”
“The narrative distracts the reader from the real thing. It distracts him from me,” said Hermann. “A magic trick: the reader watches the magician’s mumbo-jumbo and misses the trick.” Hermann’s poetics lecture, which had to be postponed twice due to the pandemic, is entitled “We would have said everything to each other – about silence and concealment in writing”. The other parts will follow on May 10th and 17th at the Goethe University and end on May 18th with a reading in the Frankfurt Literaturhaus. (dpa)