stadtsprachen magazin - multilingual literature from Berlin

The new online magazine for the multilingual contemporary literary literature of Berlin celebrated its first release in April 2017. Berlin's living writers, who do not write their texts in German, are the focus of the city's language magazine. Presented at www.stadtsprachen.de will be 26 texts by 22 authors and more than 21 translators in 13 languages, from Arabic to Georgian to Yoruba! In the original and mostly with German translation the texts are also available in several languages like English, Spanish or French etc. 

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The author of the first edition of the city's language magazine: Rasha Abbas, Juhméké Bọlanle Adéyanju, Esther Andradi, Kevin Shih-Hung Chen, Dario Deserri, Dmitri Dragilev, The Dung, Federico Federici, Iunona Guruli, Andrej Hočevar, Tolgahan Kaftan, Kenan Khadaj , Göksu Kunak, Rafael Mantovani, Steve Mekoudja, Luísa Nóbrega, Denise Pereira, Elsye Suquilanda, Menekşe Toprak, Kinga Tóth, Yimeng Wu and Érica Zíngano. 

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The following edition of the onlie magazine is expected to be published on June 8, 2017. Further editions are currently being prepared. (The editors gladly accept text proposals and blog contributions from non-German-speaking Berlin based authors.) 

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The central concern of the STADTSPRACHEN is to raise the view that German literature is not only written in German (actually since centuries). The magazine finds out the most exciting authors and their texts of the multilingual Berlin literary scene by translating their texts and make them accessible online as well as presenting them in regular readings and symposia! 

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Welcome to a discovery trip to the unexplored literary treasures of the current Berlin literature scene! 
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www.stadtsprachen.de

www.facebook.com/city languages

twitter.com/stadtsprachen

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Contact: >> Birger Hoyer, Joey Bahlsen (editors of stadtsprachen magazin): info@stadtsprachen.de >> Anna Giannessi (press officer): presse@stadtsprachen.de >> Martin Jankowski (publisher): info@berliner-literarische-aktion.de 
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Berlin Literary Action, Kastanienallee 2, 10435 Berlin, Tel .: 030 - 53 15 59 63

The real value of newest contemporary arts

the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility!

The emperor's new clothes.

Vernal Flowers ...

Must checkout these absolut amazing cuban-yoruba twins from Paris: IBEYI.
Best and strongest songs heard since months and years... real music, real poetry!

(Please listen and watch everything you can find of them - the best videos can unfortunately not be seen and linked from Germany...)

poetry conference (poem)

complaint conference
(the future of poetry)

silence please

the poets are talking

the poets are talking inside

the poets are talking inside the building

please silence they are talking about the future of poetry

silence please

the poets are worried

the poets are worried a lot

the poets are worried about poetry

the poets are worried about the future of poetry

but the truth is they are worried about the future of the poets

outside the building no silence at all

the traffic runs through the streets with a roaring

a taxi driver is buying flowers for his girl

an old woman is saying a prayer

a grey bird is praising the sun

and the young man at the sidewalk

is loudly singing his favoured pop song

may be I am not a poet

but I am not worried 

about the future

of poetry

A quote for my muslim friends (after the "Charlie Hebdo" assassinations in Paris)

"Do not let yourselves provoke now! ... The devastating of this terrible attack was (also) that it perverted the sides: It has changed the Muslims from the position of the victim to the one of the perpetrators and brought the French journal from the attacker to the victim." The magazine Charlie Hebdo of course has deliberately offended Muslims with the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet and of course it was appropriate that the Muslims would defend their prophet, but: "This must however be done with wisdom and understanding!"

Mohammed Mokhtar Gomaa, the Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments, preached at the friday prayer (9th January 2015) of the Sultan Hasan Mosque in Cairo.

Source: German weekly newspaper "Die Zeit" 

Unfortunately most German media did not report much about Merabet Ahmed, the French policeman who was murdered by the unscrupulous assassins on Wednesday in Paris. Merabet was injured in the street near the editorial office of "Charlie Hebdo", as one of the hooded perpetrators approached him and without hesitation shot in the head killing him. Merabet was a Muslim. The Muslim activist Dyab Abou Jajah wrote Thursday on Twitter: "I'm not Charlie, I'm Ahmed, the dead policeman. Charlie Hebdo was making fun of my faith and culture, and I died for his right to do that."

(some arguments) why i don't like facebook

Thanks, Derek Müller!

beyond the time (offline pirates)

bite your chip  
off the sub skin
its so incredibly

easy to escape:
hook enter
black & out

Cosmic Jazz - A SECRET MESSAGE FROM Johann Sebastian BACH!

Roberto Yanez in Berlin ...

On Friday, Nov 1st, the German-Chilean poet and painter Roberto Yanez from Santiago de Chile visited our literary salon at Kollwitzplatz in Berlin. He read some new poems on the occassion of launching his first German poetry book "Frühlingsregen" (Insel Verlag/Suhrkamp 2013) which is illustrated by his own paintings. (He also launched an exhibition of his pictures later in Berlin.) The special thing about Roberto: He is the grandson of Margot an Erich Honecker, last heads of state of the GDR until the time of the fall of the wall in 1989. Of course Roberto is tightly related to his grandparents until today but in a personal not in a political way. (Erich Honecker died in Chile in 1993, Margot is still alive an in a constant contact with him.) Roberto abruptly left Berlin with his family and went to Chile for good when he was 15 years old.

  Now it was for the first time that he came back to Germany and his hometown Berlin. As a poet who was pursued by the socialist secret service of the GDR (Stasi) at this time it was a pleasure for me now, after 23 years, to invite Roberto, who became a poet too in the meantime, for a reading to our salon ... (HERE a link to a song i wrote about his grandfather in 1989...)

And THIS is his song about his personal reunion with Berlin ...

time - the animated film (by xkcd)

Heavy little!

                                                                     ...don't miss that!

Poetry on stairs

During the Brasilian FLUPP literature festival some young people of the favela Prazeres in St. Teresa/Rio de Janeiro wrote poems on their public staircases - amongst them also my poem "festival of seconds (sekundenfest)". Thank you guys for this amazing idea! Look ...

My recommendation: Visit fascinating Rio de Janeiro and look for this!

Playing PIANO GODS - Jazz @ the Berlin Philharmonic

On tuesday, Dec 12 / 2012, three young gods of European piano jazz gave one of the best concerts I have ever witnessed in the last years: Leszek Możdżer (PL), Michael Wollny (D) and Iiro Rantala played a benefit for UNICEF at the Kammermusiksaal of the Berliner Philharmonie - on two grand pianos (one Steinway of the legendary piano master Alfred Brendel) and a Wurlitzer organ. I can only hope that they took a film or at least a recording of this evening! It was undescribably good... Each of them played some own composition, each of them played together with the others, at last all three played together. And I really mean PLAYed - every combination between zero an six hands, every combination you can imagine between 3 instruments and 6 arms of master musicians. It was even sporty and acrobatic sometimes (as they changed their positions husteling around on stage while playing together), but always highest state of the art. Actually, the best was when the masters played their own music in the focussed atmosphere of the philharmonic chamber music hall. A few standards (Bach) and great improvisation were given in a style that was really condign the idea of jazz at the venerable Berlin philharmony. Listen here, at least, to Iiro Rantalas piece "Thinking of misty" that opened that unique and really terrific concert...    

Kafka about Egyptian president Mursi

Franz Kafka when asked what he thought of the (Russian) Revolution:

"These people are so confident and funny. They are masters of the streets and think they are the masters of the world. They are wrong. (...) The more the flood spreads, the more shallow and turbid becomes the water. Then the revolution evaporates and leaves just the mud of a new bureaucracy."

 

(Gustav Janouch:.. Conversations with Kafka, memories and records Frankfurt 1951, p.71)

King Kong in Chile

 FIRST just this: http://vimeo.com/53989876

Then he arrived ...

... finally with great SUCCESS!! 

Official Video. 

(Congratulations to the friends from casagrande...)

What was up at the FLUPP in Rio?

From 7 to 11 November 2012 Rio de Janeiro's first literature festival in a favela (in Prazares at St. Teresa) took place: FLUPP! It was really an EXTRAORDINARY FESTIVAL because the audience and the concept was quite different from anything else in the world. I took part there in the program of "poets between bombs and spys" to talk about my experiences in the East German oppositional movement of 1989 in Leipzig (which lead to the fall of the wall in Berlin). THIS is what I answered to the question of the very engaged favela TV during the festival ... 

There is a detailed German blog written by me and illustrated with many photos about every day of the festival (see links - german blog).  The teeangers of the favela neighbourhood Prazares painted a quote from the lyrics of my song "sekundenfest" (from the novel "Rabet") an the stairs of their way to the top of the hill in Rio - St Teresa... (Brasilian-Portuguese version by Carlos Abbenseth; to read from the bottom stair to the top.) Muito obrigado, thank you Flavio, Charles & the others!! And congratulations to Toni Marques and his engaged team for this unique successful event.

 

FLUPP has now been nominated for the Make a Difference Award, which is an annual award given by O Globo newspaper. 

O Globo is part of Organizações Globo, the largest news and entertainment media group in Brazil and one of the largests in the world.

Some Brasilian press articles in Portuguese language concering this:

O segundo dia da FLUPP - Globo (Rio de Janeiro),  10. November 2012

FLUPP no Morro dos Prazares - machete online, 9. November 2012
 
Arte entre bombas opressao e espioes - FLUPP Blog, 9. November 2012

Novas vozes da periferia - Globo (Rio de Janeiro),  3. November 2012

THE SOUND OF (the unseen)

The Italian composer Domenico Vicinanza (who is a scientific physics researcher as well) took the mathematical data of the CERN research center concerning the legendary Higgs Boson (the famous elementary particle they believe to have found this summer) and worked it out into an amazingly interesting piece of music! Listen to the DANCE OF THE HIGGS BOSON.

The ugly question of Kitsch

Beauty is the point at which the two meanings of the word “sense” come together, the body-sense of cognition and the mind-skill of understanding the meaning of signs. When we leave the sensual aspect to beauty and start to think about it in the abstract terms of logic, we arrive at the science of aesthetics as the modern science of cognition. This science tries to find out what we mean, when we say “beautiful” or “ugly” and why. The main question is: Are there any universal and timeless criteria for beauty? If we watch an old Greek sculpture or an Indian mandala, a Japanese garden or a Russian icon, we begin to suspect that there could be. But as we all know, every time has its own taste. And after a while every aesthetic fashion returns - as a retro-revival! (No matter, whether this means columns at the house entry or gothic tales.) But this magic power of our universal beauty instinct leads us directly to the urgly question of kitsch... (a German word with universal meaning).

 The human ability to spontaneously recognise natural beauty demonstrates to us the problem of KITSCH (a non-translatable German term that means simple aesthetic stereotypes, trashy art-clichés that do not exist in reality). When we, me and my younger sister, were children (at the age of 8 or 10 years), my father, a teacher for arts and history, had a simple but wise system to teach his students to distinguish “real beauty” and “Kitsch”. He gave us a wild mixture of art-postcards with reproductions of famous paintings and kitschy pictures that we had to arrange into two piles: art and kitsch. We always managed our work very well without saying a word: The pile with the postcards that we children liked was Kitsch, what we did not like was “real art”. Our beauty instinct was infallible. We never made any mistake! Kitsch is simple, easy to understand, it shows a simple, symmetrical order, something we love in an ideal state – how beautiful! It is completely international because it is the answer to the lowest level of our beauty-instinct. In his famous essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) gave a warning not to take the pleasant already for the beautiful and not to mix up a “cute mind” with the beauty of the soul. He explained that “cute minds” become banal when they have to work on or write about a complex and huge object, the easy-going paragons of virtue turn to the materialistic, but only the truly beautiful soul becomes “sublime”.[1]

  We have to consider: There are two kinds of beauty – the natural beauty of our senses and the aesthetic beauty as a construction of our mind. (The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, father of Critical Philosophy, distinguished between beauty and the sublime: A landscape, a flower or a body can be beautiful; a poem, a painting or a cathedral are sublime.) In modern and post-modern art (including literature), the low-level art of Kitsch fortunately is no longer discriminated against as worthless. It is, on the contrary, integrated (as trash or pop) in the collage of our aesthetic concept! Nevertheless, it is useful for every professional artist to know the difference between “real art” and Kitsch. (If you are in doubt in which category your own work belongs, ask some children whether they like it…) Here we have, surprisingly, found a path to the bridge between the aesthetic category of beauty and our fascination for horror…

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[1] „Wie in dem handelnden Leben, so begegnet es auch oft bei dichterischen Darstellungen, den bloß leichten Sinn, das angenehme Talent, die fröhliche Gutmüthigkeit mit Schönheit der Seele zu verwechseln, und da sich der gemeine Geschmack überhaupt nie über das Angenehme erhebt, so ist es solchen niedlichen Geistern ein Leichtes, jenen Ruhm zu usurpieren, der so schwer zu verdienen ist. Aber es gibt eine untrügliche Probe, vermittelst deren man die Leichtigkeit des Naturells von der Leichtigkeit des Ideals, so wie die Tugend des Temperaments von der wahrhaften Sittlichkeit des Charakters unterscheiden kann, und diese ist, wenn beide sich an einem schwierigen und großen Objekte versuchen. In einem solchen Fall geht das niedliche Genie unfehlbar in das Platte, so wie die Temperamentstugend in das Materielle; die wahrhaft schöne Seele hingegen geht eben so gewiß in die erhabene über.“ - Friedrich von Schiller: Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (quotation: www.gutenberg.spiegel.de/schiller/naivsent/ naivsent.htm).