A fragmented world. City & Country | Day 3

Daily blog – Tag 3

It's about the city and our future!

The panel on this second morning of the festival in the Minoritenkirche in Krems, consisting of Osamu Okamura (Liberec), Bernadette Sarman and Fariza Bisaeva (both Vienna), will focus on the topic of the city and (successful) integration. The two young authors are participants in a European youth exchange project (Eljub), the results of which are collected in the volume ‘Erzähle mir von hier, ich erzähl dir von anderswo’ (ed. by Veronika Trubel and Walter Grond, Karl Rauch Verlag, 2024).

Firstly, Osamu Okamura, architect and Dean of the Faculty of Art and Architecture at the Technical University of Liberec, presents his multi-award-winning non-fiction picture book for children and adults ‘The City for All: Handbook for Budding Urban Planners’ (Karl Rauch Verlag, 2022). In it, he shows cities as they really are: in constant change, full of conflicts between people with different interests, but above all as a living, transformable space. This would certainly be perceived as provocative. His lecture on successful and unsuccessful cities or the different standards for determining the quality of life in cities emphasised above all the importance of each and every individual in helping to shape urban space.

In an interview with Fariza Bisaeva and Bernadette Sarmann, presenter Hans Koch first asks for their personal views on how life in Vienna, their current place of residence, differs from life in their countries of origin. Bisaeva talks about the fact that she could not afford a flat in Chechnya, which is heavily characterised by war, which she can in Vienna thanks to social housing. However, the last time she was in Chechnya was when she was three years old, so the country is more important to her on an emotional level. Sarmann emphasises the diverse possibilities of urban space. While there is a stronger focus on social etiquette such as politeness in Japan, it is more difficult to make friends and socialise.

Fariza Bisaeva's text in the presented anthology centres on shared experiences of racism, which the other panellists can also report on. It is also about the differences in the perception of people perceived as ‘different’ in the countryside and in the city. Sarmann confirms this, her father is Carinthian and in Carinthia she cannot enter a pub without silence and people staring at her. She is not normally as aware of being ‘different’ in Vienna as she is there. Although things are better in the city, Bisaeva adds, racism is still there, just more subtle. Osamu Okamura is also no stranger to experiences of racism in everyday life. However, the distance that is created is sometimes even pleasant for him because it allows him to look at some things more sharply.

The excerpt from the anthology read by Bernadette Sarmann is about the visit to the Leipzig Book Fair in 2023 with Austria's guest country appearance. The special thing about this visit was the encounters and exchanges with authors and the dynamics within the group.

On the topic of the city and migration, and the question of how life in the city could be better organised to improve integration, Bisaeva emphasises the importance of education and the high inheritability of education in Austria - she always stresses that she has managed to rise despite the education system in Austria, not because of it. The panellists also agreed that barriers for people with diverse backgrounds need to be broken down, as many people have great inhibitions when it comes to entering established (art) spaces. A call to create a city for everyone.

KremsMachtGeschichte

After lunch, Gregor Kremser, Head of the Department of Culture and Director of museumkrems, welcomes the participants to a walk to places of historical significance around Südtiroler Platz in the city centre. Under the title ‘KremsMachtGeschichte’ (Krems Power History), a themed contemporary history trail was set up that leads to 24 historical locations. Gregor Kremser and Max Dietrich lead the participants in two groups around the square at Steiner Tor to a small but representative selection of these stations. According to Dietrich, every city would benefit from such a themed trail, but Krems was in particular need of one. He recalled that Krems became the capital of the Niederdonau district in 1938, but was the first town with a National Socialist mayor even earlier, in 1932. Starting at the former Neuner lingerie shop, which after 1938 was one of the Jewish businesses whose owners were expropriated and expelled, the group walked past the only new civilian building from the Nazi era, the Brauhofsaal, to the Karl Eibl memorial, the only memorial to a general of the Wehrmacht in the German-speaking world, and finally to a park dedicated to the resistance fighter Therese Mahrer. How memory fades and what effects this has on a city's culture of remembrance, but also how much this is shaped and influenced by politics and those in power, becomes clear in very different ways at the stations. According to Max Dietrich, only one Jew from Krems returned to the city after the Second World War and died here in the 1970s. History was erased and attempts were made to overwrite it - so it is all the more important to draw attention to this dark chapter in the history of Krems and to tell of traces of the National Socialist era, some of which have been forgotten, some of which have been destroyed, but some of which still remain. The walk ends at museumkrems.

Today, the night of 9 to 10 November, marks the 86th anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht, recalls Gregor Kremser in the former cloister of the Dominican monastery, which is now part of the museum. He introduces the musician and poet Nicolas Robert Lang, who combines social criticism with poetry in his songs and encourages the audience to reflect, to think further and to place what they have just experienced on the walk in an artistic context. Following the impressive concert, the Krems winery provides an insight into another art for which this town is world-famous: winegrowing, and invites you to a tasting.

Country life, an idyll?

As in previous years, we were able to organise a book talk with our podcast ‘Auf Buchfühlung’. Back at the Minoritenkirche, we welcomed authors Lorena Simmel and Alina Herbing to the stage, both of whom had travelled from Berlin but also know rural life from their own (childhood) experience.

Lorena Simmel was born and raised in Switzerland - and returned to her home region in the Swiss Lake District for a few months as a seasonal worker. The experiences she gained from this work, as well as the relationships she made with Eastern European seasonal workers, have been incorporated into her debut novel ‘Ferymont’ (Verbrecher Verlag, 2024), which portrays a region in the heart of Europe and uses a great deal of linguistic sensitivity to question capitalist working conditions and focus on the stories of seasonal workers. In the interview, she talks about her view of the country, which has changed as a result of writing the novel, about her attempt to tell stories in solidarity and about concrete experiences in the landscape here around Krems, where she could even imagine living one day - at least that's what she makes credible in this likeable conversation.

Alina Herbing's ‘Tiere, vor denen man Angst haben muss’ (Arche Verlag, 2024) is her second literary exploration of the countryside. In the novel about a family that moved just over the former border to the East after reunification, where the mother wanted to realise her dream of an anti-capitalist life in the countryside, Herbing consistently dissects the supposed idyll. Not only does the family increasingly disintegrate, while animals conquer the dilapidated house and nature begins to devour the buildings - and thus civilisation. But the cold is also spreading: a real one in the house, an emotional one in the mother, who lets her children become increasingly neglected and focuses entirely on the animals in the rescue centre she runs. Herbing, who moved from the city to the countryside with her family as a child, talks about what this change meant to her and what continues to make this material attractive to her as an author. She talks about the dynamics between the characters in the novel and the political conditions in the border region between East and West and also states that although the divide between town and country is certainly present in some areas, in her opinion it is by no means as extensive as is repeatedly claimed. 

Of Brazilian street labourers and Bulgarian death troughs

The atmospheric sounds of ‘Trio Lumi’ open this last festival evening with soulful to lively violins, cello and vocals. The trio represents the diversity of European culture not only through its international line-up, but also through the pieces of music carefully selected for this evening - from Scandinavian wedding dances to Hungarian songs. In literary terms, this evening is about the invisible in the cities. On the one hand, we travel to the slums of São Paolo, on the other to the women in the suburbs of Sofia who are alone because their husbands work in the West.

Patrícia Melo is considered one of the most important voices in contemporary Brazilian literature. In her new novel ‘The City of Others’ (translated from Portuguese by Barbara Mesquita, Unionsverlag, 2024), she portrays homeless people in São Paolo who live in close proximity to the super-rich in their secluded residences.

In conversation with presenter Veronika Trubel, the author provides illuminating insights into a reality of life that is all too often overlooked and underestimated. For example, she debunks the prejudice that homeless people are lazy and don't work by pointing out the great distances these people have to walk every day, how much unpaid work they do every day - from cleaning to guarding car parks - and ultimately that they have to think anew every day about where they can spend the night and where they can get something to eat. Writing this book was particularly painful because these people are so overlooked - they only get attention when violence is perpetrated against them. It is never a free choice to live on the streets, because homeless people are ‘trapped in freedom’.

The issue of inequality in Brazil is very clear, the misery is everywhere and very visible. Her motivation was to understand the situation of the homeless in her country by writing about it. When asked about the differences between São Paolo and a major European city, she says that Brazil is almost like a continent of its own, so the problems are continental problems (22 million people live in São Paolo alone). The violence in Brazil is structural and people learn from an early age how to deal with violence and protect themselves from it.

After the haunting reading from the novel by actress Dörte Lyssewski and a musical interlude, the event continues with Zdravka Evtimova, who has travelled to Krems from Pernik, Bulgaria. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, most recently into German with the volume ‘Maulwurfsblut’ (translated from the Bulgarian by Andreas Tretner, Alexander Sitzmann and Elvira Bormann-Nassonowa; eta Verlag, 2024), which is the subject of this evening's programme.

They are strong, four-dimensional women, the author describes, and presenter Viktoria Trubel is also visibly enthusiastic about them. Where do these characters come from? The truth guides Evtimova's writing. These are stories that she reads off people's faces, so to speak. Sometimes she meets people on the street and sees so many stories in them. Then she sometimes invites them for coffee. Conversely, she is often invited for coffee by people who like her stories - ‘that's also a kind of literary criticism’.

Women in Bulgaria have never been subordinate, at most love would bind them to a man for a time. They have always taken matters into their own hands, as Zdravka Evtimova's lively anecdotes make abundantly clear. In a refreshingly laconic way, she talks about a special herbal concoction that is a tried and tested way for women in the region to take revenge on violent men. Her mother didn't want to give her money for a typewriter, but told her to go into the forest and collect rosehips so that she could earn money for a typewriter. The audience and the other guests on stage are also delighted by the author's laconic wit, whose anecdotes could probably be listened to for much longer.

All in all, it is a wonderfully diverse evening, characterised by extremely clever authors, stimulating and humorous conversations and atmospheric music. And a fitting last Elit Festival evening here in the Minorite Church in Krems.