Past Predictions - author reading with Luna Ali, Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner and Raphaëlle Red - on April 11, 2025 - Schauspielhaus, Unterhaus

In the 2021/22 season, ten authors met regularly at the D'haus to write about the fractures and interfaces between individual and collective memory. The joint meeting as part of "Vergangenheit Vorhersagen" (Predicting the Past) has shaped the characters that three participants of the writing lab tell about in their recently published novels: A road trip along the West African coast and all the way to the USA, "Adikou" by Raphaëlle Red (Rowohlt) tells of the afterlife of the past and what it means to find one's own language. In "Messer, Zungen", Simoné Goldschmidt-Lechner (Matthes & Seitz) brings an imagined past in South Africa face to face with Germany's backward-looking future, and in "Da waren Tage", Luna Ali (S. Fischer) describes how the events in Syria are inscribed in the lives, actions and language of the diaspora. The authors invite you to a discussion about what political literature means, where this category falls short and how it can be broken open.