Life Is Not an Escape Room: Volker Weidermann (Germany) in Conversation with Dr. Stefan Litt
The event will be held in English
Journalist, editor, and author Volker Weidermann was born in Darmstadt, Germany, and studied political science and German history in Heidelberg and Berlin. He has served as a culture and literature editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Der Spiegel, and received the Kurt-Tucholsky Prize for Literary Journalism for his book The Book of Burned Books. He is the author of several biographies and works on literature and history.
His recent book, Ostend. 1936, Summer of Friendship (Persimmon Books, 2024, translated by Pe’er Friedmann Erez Volk), is a literary-historical work that recounts the summer of 1936 in the Belgian seaside town of Ostend, where a group of exiled German and Austrian writers – most of them Jewish – had gathered after fleeing the terror of the Nazi regime.
Weidermann will speak with historian Dr. Stefan Litt, a scholar of modern Jewish history, about the lives of writers in exile and how their literary work grappled with living in a time of
destruction.
This event is part of a collaboration to promote contemporary European literature between the European Union and the International Writers Festival at Mishkenot Sha'ananim.
