Der Winter der Literatur | Lesung im Staublau

In the organizer's words:

Who falls asleep in democracy...

Part 1: The winter of literature

"Those who fall asleep in democracy wake up in dictatorship" - a sentence of oppressive topicality.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that there is currently a whole series of literary discussions on the subject of "artists during the National Socialist era".

February 1933: it happened at breakneck speed back then. February 1933 was the month in which everything was decided for writers in Germany. From day to day, it was possible to observe how the glittering literary life of the Weimar period gave way to a long winter in just a few weeks and how the net for Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, for Else Lasker-Schüler, Alfred Döblin and many others became ever tighter.

June 1940: Hitler's Wehrmacht has defeated France. The Gestapo searches for Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger and countless others who have found asylum in France since 1933. Meanwhile, the American Varian Fry arrives in Marseille to rescue as many of them as possible. It is the most dramatic year in German literary history. Anna Seghers flees Paris on foot with her children. Lion Feuchtwanger is imprisoned in a French internment camp while the SS units close in. They all end up in Marseille, from where they try to find a way to freedom...

With "February 33" and "Marseille 1940", Uwe Wittstock has written two oppressive chronicles of this time, historically outstanding and today probably more topical than ever.

The following people read: Franziska Vondrlik, Ulf Goerges and Ralf Selmer