Goethe-Institut Chicago

Join the Goethe-Institut Chicago and the Austrian Consulate General for a reading by Austria’s best known crime writer Wolf Haas as he reads from ‘Brenner and God’ in both English and German.

Philip Boehm was selected by a five-member jury as the winner of this year’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Gregor von Rezzori’s An Ermine in Czernopol.

The Jewish-American author Alvin Gilens presents his new book “Reconciling Lives”. This book features the stories of young German volunteers sent by Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (ARSP) to the US, Great Britain, Czech Republic and Israel, and the relationships they built with Holocaust survivors during a year of service.

This year Literaturlenz brings together three writers of prose in German: Silke Scheuermann from Germany, Ulrike Ulrich from Switzerland, and Cornelia Travnicek of Austria. The readings are followed by a discussion in English moderated by Susan Harris, editorial director of Words Without Borders.

Professor Jack Zipes examines the historical process of the globalized Americanization of Grimms’ fairy tales with a focus on Snow White and the consequences the process has had for understanding the intentions of the Brothers Grimm and the meaning of the tales that they collected and edited.

Burton Pike was selected by a five-member jury as the winner of this year’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Gerhard Meier’s Isle of the Dead (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), originally published as Toteninsel.

Listen in as Goethe-Institut Chicago and Poetry Foundation for an evening of music and poetry performed by Tzveta Sofronieva, Sam Burckhardt, and Chantal Wright.