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PEN World Voices: Private Lives, Public Lives, Other Lives, New Lives report

by literary saloon on May 03, 2008

Ingo Schulze and Eliot Weinberger got together to discuss Private Lives, Public Lives, Other Lives, New Lives at the Goethe Institut, in front of a good-size audience. It turned out to be pretty much an introduction to Schulze, covering his career trajectory and especially his recent (2006) novel, which will be coming out as New Lives in the fall from Knopf, in a translation by John E. Woods, from which he also read an excerpt.

Schulze was born in what was then still East Germany, in 1962, and did not publish until after the fall of the wall; the East-West contrast was a recurring subject in the conversation. Schulze actually went east in the 1990s, to St.Petersburg—his business-man (as newspaperman) years—and noted generally that the East German 1990s seemed to him much like at least the European 1950s, a time of rapid change and rise of living standards (with the new-found possibilities of discretionary spending, travelling abroad, etc.). Still, when Weinberger suggested that his books were like a documentation of private lives (in keeping with the festival theme ...) in East Germany, he said he never thought of that (though he seemed inclined to agree).

Among the points raised were the English-- or rather German-versions-of-English-words of some of his titles: Simple Storys (’Simple schtorries’ as he gave the ‘Saxon’ pronunciation, published in English as Simple Stories), or his new novel, Handy (which, as a bemused Weinberger noted, is the German term for cellphone—allowing, he observed, English-speakers to go around asking folks in Germany if they have their handy handy, etc.)

Of interest, too, the German authors Schulze praised—most notably Wolfgang Hilbig, whom he holds in particularly high regard. When asked to named other authors he though highly of he named: Hans Joachim Schädlich, Katja Langen-Müller, and Marcel Beyer .

Overall: a decent, fairly informative introduction to the author.

Bonus Wolfgang Hilbig-links:

• His story The Abandoned Factory, in Agni
• Excerpts from his work at The Drunken Boat
• new books in german introduces his book, Das Provisorium

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