“Through books that will come into being here, I want to help prevent the mistakes of the past from ever being repeated”, Anna Seghers said after she arrived in Berlin in 1947. She had returned as a world-famous author from exile to Germany. For many authors in the young GDR, including Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller, her multi-layered work offered a source of literary inspiration. In German.

After the National Socialists seized power, the director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub was immediately dismissed and was henceforth barred from entering his institute. The explosive family letters between him and his son Felix Hartlaub about the political upheaval in Germany were published in SINN UND FORM in 2017. Editor-in-chief Matthias Weichelt talks about them with the author Durs Grünbein, well-versed connoisseur of Felix Hartlaub's works. In German.

The following have been nominated for the public reading of the Alfred Döblin Prize, donated by Günter Grass: Andrea Rea Arežina, Sophia Merwald, Martin Piekar, Lina Schwenk, Janna Steenfatts and Karosh Taha. The finalists will present their texts to the audience and the experts. In the late afternoon, the jury will announce the recipient of the prize, which will be awarded the following day at the Akademie der Künste. In German.

In its fourth appearance at the Akademie the trans-national KULA Compagnie presents her version of Der Dibbuk, setting the 1920 Yiddish classic into a contemporary, interreligious context. Despite the war’s breaking out during rehearsals, the mutual goal remained: to continue talking and performing with one another, to seek bringing about communication. In Dari, Algerian-Arabic, German, French, Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish with German and English surtitles.

The Alfred Döblin Prize, donated by Günter Grass, is awarded for a longer prose manuscript in progress. The award winner will be announced the day before in a public reading at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, where the finalists will present their texts to the audience and experts. In addition to a reading from the winning manuscript and a discussion with the award winner, Jan Kuhlbrodt, winner in 2023, will give a speech on Döblin. In German.

“We are at the limit of where words are not enough and have to prove who we really are”, wrote the author Hans Erich Nossack in October 1946 to his colleague Ilse Molzahn, who had lost both her sons in the war. Eighty years later, their correspondence, published for the first time in SINN UND FORM, still provides food for thought on how to write about war and loss, responsibility and guilt. In German.

We invite you to an enjoyable and surprising path of exploration through the interior and exterior spaces of the Akademie der Künste – filled with unheard music and sound. Small, intimate concert situations in meeting rooms, silence in the concert hall, playful kinetic sound machines, improvisations, musicians on the forecourt to the academy, picnics in the Beech Garden and more. A warm welcome to everyone to share the place and the music on a long day in May.