Katja Hensel, Magdeburg’s tenth town clerk, lives high up, with a wide view over the roofs of the city. “The ideal place. Basically how you imagine a town clerk to be. In a tower,” she says.
Hensel’s town clerk’s apartment is on the eighth floor. There are windows almost everywhere and in the morning the sun shines in from the east. The native of Hamburg has been living here since March 1 and will stay for the next seven months. From her roof terrace she has a 360 degree view over Magdeburg. “Intel will change the city,” says Hensel about the planned settlement of the US chip manufacturer. How should the city change? As a city writer, she is interested in future visions of cities. Now the space is there to help shape it yourself.
Saxony-Anhalt’s state capital, Magdeburg, is one of several German cities that award a city clerk scholarship. Mainz, Halle (Saale), Tübingen and Dresden also do this. This modern tradition, based on the historical town clerks from the 13th century, began in 1974 in Bergen-Enkheim near Frankfurt. The writer Franz Joseph Schneider wanted to give freelance writers the opportunity to live financially independently for a year.
Up to one year
Depending on the city, city clerks are proposed by a jury or apply on their own initiative. The town clerk’s office lasts up to one year. The writers are paid a total of four to five digits. They also get an apartment.
“City writers enliven our city’s cultural scene, they act as ambassadors far beyond the city limits,” says a spokeswoman. They observed what was happening in a city, they should inspire and “bring appropriate impulses into the city and into the cultural landscape”.
Hensel would like to write herself and present what she experienced in Magdeburg in readings. She will continue to run the town’s town clerk blog. She wants to encourage children and young people to write creatively, for example in workshops that deal with the language. Hensel plans to get children excited about an active use of language. Nowadays young people have little space to do things for their own sake, many things are judged or associated with pressure to perform. “I would like to teach children more that literature is something different than “I have to read children from the train station now and I’ll be happy when I’m finally through”.
Dörte Hansen feels his way forward
The best-selling author Dörte Hansen (“Altes Land”) is only slowly finding her way into her new life as Mainz’s 37th town clerk. She succeeds Eugen Ruge and was still writing her new novel until a few weeks ago. “Understanding the essence of Fastnacht – if a person from North Friesland is able to do that at all,” is what Hansen would like to try during her year as a town clerk. Listening to the Mainz dialect and strolling through the streets is what her job as a town clerk is all about, perhaps she also keeps a kind of log book. But she still has a lot to learn, since she had never been to Mainz before taking office. She is particularly looking forward to “listening, looking and getting to know each other” – being able to explore a new city for a year is a great gift for her.
“As a town clerk, you’re a kind of flâneur, but not in the sense of just going for a walk and looking, but rather tense and ready to absorb all sorts of stimuli,” says Barbara Thériault, Halle an der Saale’s new city clerk.
She wants to cut people’s hair in different salons, watch or talk to people. In the salon you have time and the person is “quasi trapped in front of you on a chair”.
She would like to write texts about the city, the inhabitants, the places or observations from everyday life that can perhaps still be read five years from now.
The historical town clerks in the Middle Ages had a highly official function and wrote important documents. For almost 50 years there has been the modern version of the town clerk, who is not only interested in literary works, but also in contact with people. Whether and how the town clerk grant will continue to exist seems to be an open question. In Magdeburg, the number of applicants has decreased over the years. There was no town clerk in Tübingen in 2021 due to the corona pandemic. After the pandemic, it will therefore be a challenge to bring the city writer scholarship to the public, according to a city spokesman. (dpa)