Critically Yours: Das Launch-Festival der Berlin Review

In the organizer's words:

Free admission!
Open air in good weather

For half a year now, Berlin Review. Zeitschrift für Bücher und Ideen has existed for six months as an online magazine, a series of talks and a podcast, and since June 2024 also as a printed magazine with texts by Adania Shibli, Yevgenia Belorusets, Alan Pauls, Ralph Tharayil, Claudia Durastanti, Logan February and many more. This needs to be celebrated: with a launch festival for the first reader!

Berlin Review publishes a form of literary, art and cultural criticism that is interested in subtle aesthetic differences while always keeping an eye on essential questions of the present. Quick opinions and fabricated interpretations can be found in large numbers on social media with every swipe. However, criticism is only valuable if it offers more than that - knowledge, depth and accuracy, the courage to politicize where it makes sense, and the courage to abstain from discourse where debates no longer make sense.

High and Low
With Maxi Wallenhorst and Tobias Haberkorn
Are both hard theory and soft performances legitimate subjects of contemporary criticism? Why do the arts pages still find it difficult to appreciate both equally? Author Maxi Wallenhorst and Berlin Review editor Tobias Haberkorn talk about this.

Polyphonic criticism
With Edna Bonhomme, Miriam Stoney and Samir Sellami
How does literary journalism work in several languages and multiple cultural contexts? What role do translations play and what are the erratic or planned techniques for finding the right topics as a critic? Berlin Review editor Samir Sellami talks about this with science historian and literary critic Edna Bonhomme and author and translator Miriam Stoney.

How much thinking is there in criticism?
With Elad Lapidot and Eva von Redecker
Why do we all seem to be addicted to criticism? But why does it have less and less social impact? Are we merely consumers of controversy and mechanical differences? How can we distinguish between attention-seeking and constructive dialog? - Do we need a new philosophy of criticism? This is the subject of the discussion with philosophers Elad Lapidot and Eva von Redecker.