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In the organizer's words:

Iris Wolff and Dana Grigorcea have published two artist novels this year that take Romania as their starting point - albeit at completely different times. "Emigration was inevitable. Like an addiction. Everyone was afraid of being the last," writes Iris Wolff in her novel about Transylvania, which is told in wonderfully dense language in an extremely artful way backwards, i.e. chronologically into the past. "Lichtungen" is about broken hearts, shattered national identities and belonging as a decision.

Dana Grigorcea, who, like Wolff, was also born in Romania and now lives in Switzerland, sets her artist's novel "The Weight of a Bird Flying" in contemporary Italy and New York in the 1920s. In her recently published novel, Dana Grigorcea tells a clever and entertaining story about the delicate relationship between life and art, which a contemporary novelist deals with using the example of the sculptor Brâncuși. In her previous novel "Die nicht sterben", she depicts the contradictions of different social forms and classes in a family novel and shows the effects of Ceausescu's dictatorship and neo-capitalism on a village in the Carpathians.

Reading and discussion

Moderation: Anne-Dore Krohn