feeLit 2026: Retrospektive der Künstlerin und Schriftstellerin Ré Soupault

From July 2 to 5, feeLit - International Literature Festival Heidelberg and its authors will be making a guest appearance at halle02 for the second time. Our festival venue is all about books and writing. This year, feeLit presents national and international literary stars and brings authors together with their audience.

feeLit 2026: Retrospective of the artist and writer Ré Soupault

Moderation: Dr. Agathe Mareuge and Manfred Metzner
Language: German

"And something happened with Itten that liberated us. We didn't learn to paint, we learned to see anew, to think anew and at the same time we got to know ourselves."

At the age of twenty, Ré Soupault, then still called Meta Erna Niemeyer, came to the Bauhaus in Weimar from Pomerania in 1921. Against her parents' wishes, she was one of the first women to study at the Bauhaus and the four years she spent there were to shape her significantly as a person and artist.
While still a student, she worked with the avant-garde artist Vikting Eggeling on his experimental film "Diagonal-Symphonie". At the beginning of the 1930s, she began a career as a fashion designer in Paris and invented the transforming dress and the trouser skirt: functional and aesthetic at the same time, in keeping with the Bauhaus philosophy, but also in keeping with the modern, working woman. When Ré Soupault met her future husband, the surrealist, publisher and journalist Philippe Soupault, she turned to photography and documented the numerous trips they undertook together. Her photographic work is also influenced by the Bauhaus: she always tried to identify with the object she was photographing, to be truthful. After fleeing Tunis (1942), she lived in Algeria and the USA for a long time. It was not until 1948 that she returned to Europe from exile and lived in Basel. In 1957, she returned to Paris and worked as a translator, radio author and editor of international fairy tale collections. She died in Paris in 1996. On October 29, she would have been 125 years old

Dr. Agathe Mareuge is a lecturer in German studies and cultural mediation at the Sorbonne University in Paris. In her research and teaching, Agathe Mareuge has always been interested in Franco-German, international issues and transdisciplinarity. Agathe Mareuge specializes in the history of Dadaism, Surrealism and the Bauhaus. She is currently working on her habilitation at the Sorbonne on Ré Soupault.

Manfred Metzner is a publisher (Verlag Das Wunderhorn) and has been the administrator of Ré Soupault's estate since 1996. His publishing house has produced 20 publications about her to date. He has also curated numerous exhibitions on her work (e.g. Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Kunsthalle Mannheim, University of Basel, Goethe-Institut world tour).

Good to know

• Only cashless payment (EC card, credit card, contactless) is possible at our venue: halle02.de/cashless
• Seated event, free choice of seats
• Local organizer: FeeLit - International Literature Festival Heidelberg