Since 2009, acclaimed writers, artists, readers, and friends of literature have gathered in a small Austrian town for four days to attend the European Literature Days festival. With each edition addressing a vital, timely theme of contemporary European writing, the packed program features some of the most brilliant minds across the continent. In the following dispatch, Editor-at-Large MARGENTO reports from this singular event.
The town of Krems an der Donau in Austria is a unique place in Europe, conducive to genuinely special literary and arts events such as the annual European Literature Days. Off the trodden path of regular tourist destinations, it is both compellingly picturesque as well as conveniently distant from the hustle and bustle of the capital, but nevertheless retaining the latter’s intransigence for excellence in higher education and the arts.
The city’s tortuously narrow medieval streets wind between old churches and traditional pubs, and every now and then, they open upon wide panoramas of the Danube and the terraced vineyards surrounding it, resulting in a landscape both mysterious and inspirational. Ancient, blurred guild symbols and still-colorful frescos of winemaking deities and feasts are punctured by modern glass-and-concrete design and dernier-cri technology logos and landmarks. The stately Minorite Church in the heart of the old town is one such hub that combines rich cultural and architectural traditions with widely relevant contemporary interests and activities; the church is nowadays a generous cultural event and concert hall of excellent acoustics and high-tech video and audio equipment. It was the venue of most of European Literature Days’ 2023 events, while the former monastery’s annexes host a museum, art galleries, and multiple multi-purpose spaces—some of which also played an important role in the logistics of the festival.
The ancient refectory, for instance, immediately adjacent to the church, was conveniently used for the welcoming reception on the first night, where I was happy to discover that vegetarian and vegan menus were unusually dominant. This, combined with the fact that quite a few of the featured writers, participants, and audience members had brought along their dogs and other pets, was indicative of an animal-loving ethos; in fact, the very theme of this edition was actually “Animals and Other People.”
Indeed, the four days of the festival were full of roundtables, readings, interviews, exhibitions, and performances focusing on the intersection of literature and the animal world, within an inclusive multicultural/multilingual, ecological, sustainability-informed, sociological, and philosophical framework. These various angles (as highlighted by the festival’s director Walter Grond) were especially encapsulated by the cutting-edge work of featured writer Mara-Daria Cojocaru. A lauded German-language poet and active British academic and philosopher (of Romanian extraction), Cojocaru was conveniently scheduled both early in the festival—in conversation with Dutch writer Eva Meijer and moderated by the indefatigable Rosie Goldsmith of the European Literature Network—as well as on the last night with a poetry reading. These two bookends were complemented by an exhibition of her work, informed by what she has coined to be a “multispecies poetics.” What transpired from all these contributions was her progressive philosophy related to the co-responsibility shared by humans and other animals in this world (an idea adopted and developed on by other participants throughout the festival), and her biologically and ecologically Whitmanesque poetics of a literature that not only featured animals, but that were written/mediated together with them, and intended for them as well. Her exhibits of object poetry co-authored with dogs (and… other people) were compellingly illustrative of such concepts and poetics in practice, combining text with various household or outdoor items that the dogs picked or persistently sniffed on while playing or during walks.
The first night of the festival saw Cojocaru’s kindred spirit and another remarkable philosopher, Anne Sophie Meincke, in a heated debate with writer Michael Köhlmeier, moderated by Katja Gasser, in which Meincke questioned the differentiability between humans and the other animals. Hers emerged as a view of holistic and inclusive eco-philosophy in which animals can play the role of moderators (between humans and the environment); it was a perspective—as the bloggers of the festival, Victoria Strobl and Irene Zanol, shrewdly and ironically noted—additionally illustrated by her dog; Nildo, brought along by the philosopher and soon emerged as a festival mascot, occasionally walked across the stage to Köhlmeier, cajoling strokes from him even as the latter was expressing his skepticism regarding the ability of animals to exercise rationality or free will.
Hungarian-international performance/cross-artform poet and researcher Kinga Tóth wittily continued in a similar vein to Cojocaru and Meincke on the last night of the festival when, during an onstage roundtable, she praised animals for still being our friends after all the cruelty and cynicism they’ve received at the hands of humans. Applying concepts such as the performative turn—not only within the custom confines of academia but in unconventional realms such as contemporary monastic culture and literature—Tóth is an innovative poet who riffed in her post-psychedelic performance off of families of words that to Anglo ears may have sounded hegemonically related to “Sabbath,” while their Hungarian meaning actually ironically and ecologically gravitated to “Free [the animals]!”
Fable-like and allegorical depiction of animals nevertheless prevailed in the literature presented or discussed at the festival, though authors did offer a modern and ecological genre of fables in which speaking animals were not characterized so as to allude to human society (alone), but to an Anthropocene where animals could be finally included as full members. Consequently, while the morals continued to be aimed towards humans, just as in traditional fables, the educational messages were related to the very animals depicted or anthropomorphized in the works. This new genre could be thus seen as paradoxical, non-allusive fables, or literal allegory. In Slovak writer Michal Hvorecky’s fiction, a sturgeon, for instance, that has been swimming in the Danube for millennia—since before the appearance of the human species—confessionally recounts how its life and environment has been catastrophically impacted by the latter, while in one of Swiss poet, playwright, and screenplay writer Antoine Jaccoud’s works, a bull and a cow fall in love with each other outside a slaughterhouse, minutes before their death. Jaccoud touched upon this story during a conversation with French novelist Sibylle Grimbert (also moderated by Rosie Goldsmith), and whereas Grimbert modestly stated that what she wrote was ‘just’ fiction, and one should not expect it to change the world—at least not in the politically immediate sense of the word, Jaccoud received an implicitly edgy question from the audience in a similar vein: will his bull-and-cow (if not… bull-and-cock) story change the world? No, he answered, but it will hopefully make at least one person sitting in the audience hesitate for at least a second before the next time they buy meat.
Speaking of edgy exchanges, given the complexity of the issue at hand and the richness of the topics, the atmosphere was not simply permeated with perfect agreement and like-mindedness; some of the above-mentioned onstage polemics occasionally spilled into animated conversations during coffee and lunch breaks. As foxes multiply in urban areas across Europe (the topic of one of the panels), a few festival participants and members of the general public had a rather heated conversation over the appetizers regularly served in the evenings. In debating over animal rights, an example was brought up of people who raise chickens in their backyard: when it comes to animal rights, should they allow foxes to sneak in and help themselves, or take action (against the latter) and safeguard their poultry? There was no unanimous concurrence on either course of action.
But even if agreement was not always reached (which actually made things even more exciting to follow or participate in), it was love—for both animals and literature—that was always in the air, tangibly so (as British journalist Lucy Popescu also noted in a timely review) and embodied by the town’s citizens. The bartender was intimately familiar with the work of quite a few of the participants, be they headliners like Philippe Sands or younger writers and artists—and I suspect, given the turns of phrases he sported when introducing the delicious local white wines, he was a poet in his own right. The driver who picked me up at the Vienna airport and drove me to Krems performed in a one-of-a-kind folk-jazz band, Takeshi’s Cashew, that had just returned from a tour around western Europe. The one that drove me back to the airport after the festival had no less than two bands, one of which was named for a literary allusion (referencing Helge Schneider), Earl Mobley. No wonder the festival itself has an amazing YouTube channel. Lastly, what made me feel even more at home—among other significant aspects—was the fact that, due to the brilliant work of Julia Sherwood in covering the festival for our journal for almost a decade before me, everybody in attendance was an Asymptote fan.
Chris Tănăsescu aka MARGENTO is Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova. His alias is the name of an internationally awarded intermedia rock band, a global coalition of writers, computer scientists, translators, musicians, and visual artists, the editors of widely praised computationally assembled poetry anthologies, as well as the data-commoning networked authors of the #GraphPoem events presented in four continents since 2001 and annually at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute since 2019.
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