Every year, European Literature Days transforms the Austrian city of Krens an der Donau into a lively, welcoming theatre for the celebration of contemporary writing, featuring readings, dialogues, workshops, and other cultural programming coordinated under a selected subject. The 2024 edition had the urban-rural complex as its central theme, and in the following dispatch, our editor-at-large MARGENTO reports on the events and conversations that took place.
Late last November, as I headed back to Krems-on-the-Danube to attend European Literature Days (Europäischen Literaturtage) for the second time, I realized that there was a need for me to both grasp the event’s larger context and to hone in on its details and nuances. This concurrence of conflicting scales requires starting this brief dispatch in media res, with a tour offered by the organizers on the third day of the festival. There, the guides Gregor Kremser and Max Dietrich took participants around town, unveiling multilayered histories and instances of reinscribing the past. The landmarks ranged from a park named for the anti-Nazi resistance fighter Therese Mahrer, to the only memorial (in Austria and Germany if not the world) dedicated to a WWII German military—ironically on the very eighty-sixth anniversary of the Reich’s genocidal pogrom.
The theme of the 2024 edition was “A Fragmented World: City & Country,” and as illustrated above, the program excelled in revealing the rich, often conflicting, and sometimes cacophonous juxtapositions that such a subject can entail. In his inaugural address, the festival’s artistic director, Walter Grond, quite appropriately contextualized the literary focus within the then-recent election results in both the United States and Austria, remarking on a potentially widening gap between a globally aware, digitally inclined urban social elite and predominantly conservative, less internationalized, and less digitally oriented groups in the countryside. Although this polarity was repeatedly challenged from multiple angles during the interviews and discussions that followed, it seemed to resonate with—or even give rise to—a range of other significant contrasts, exhibited on numerous occasions.
My favorite example was the deceptively lulling tone of Lorena Simmel, one of the featured rising stars, as she read excerpts from her debut novel, Ferymont. Taking place at the festival’s main venue, the Minorite Church, Simmel was joined by another Berlin-based novelist, Alina Herbing, and the two moderators, Rebekka Zeinzinger and Irene Zanol (who diligently blogged the entire festival and detailed the goings-on in their podcast, Auf Buchfühlung). Modest and self-ironic, with an occasional hint of sarcasm, Simmel showcases an increasingly rich and nuanced poetics of language, localism, politics, and transculturalism through the autobiographical fiction of Ferymont, which sees its protagonist returning to her native Switzerland to take a summer job on a farm in the lake district. Joining her are several other seasonal workers, including a young lady from Eastern Europe of about the same age, and the well-tempered lyricism of the prose captures both the faux-idyllic landscape and the societal complexities emerging between the characters, allowing for silences and multi-angled perspectives to concretize such multi-faceted intercultural (and interclass) cross-pollinations, tensions, and clashing vistas.
While Simmel’s work remained deliberately ambiguous about the countryside—whether as a matrix of social tension or a mere backdrop for concerns originating from larger (urban?) networks—one of the festival’s most charismatic participants was more explicit about these issues. Czech-Japanese architect and architecture professor Osamu Okamura engagingly argued in favor of cities to be seen, planned, experienced, and performed as live, interactive, and dynamical environments. His award-winning picture book Die Stadt für alle (City for Everyone) was in and of itself one of the highlights of the festival, captivatingly addressing experts and the general public in the widest sense—including children—with a flexible, relaxed expertise that looks at pertinent sociological issues with a penchant for problem solving, and substantiated with real-life examples. Whether in dialogue with the popular, innovative philosopher-anthropologist Lisz Hirn or the Latourian trans-genre writer Nikolaj Schultz, Okamura’s down-to-earth sophistication charmed the audience with a global, transnational approach to public spaces and heartwarmingly candid anecdotes. When asked to illustrate the city as a “site of ongoing interaction and negotiation, public and private at the same time,” he responded: “My own brother met the woman he would eventually marry while they were both impatiently waiting for a delayed metro in downtown Prague. . .”
War and peace, while already metaphorically present in such exchanges, took center stage on the final day, when Walter Grond welcomed the festival’s highlight: Israeli writer David Grossman, who was interviewed onstage by ELit’s longtime stalwart, Rosie Goldsmith. Having just received the Austrian Book Trade Honorary Award for Tolerance in Thought and Action after a lifetime advocating for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, Grossman spoke movingly about the loss of his son in the ongoing conflict, and also received a standing ovation after stating his condemnation of both Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians and the dramatically dwindling democracy under the nation’s ruling party. I did not, however, agree with him in calling the boycott of Israeli literary/cultural institutions “stupid”; I personally take particular pride in the fact that we at Asymptote, for instance, stand against the complicity of such institutions in the genocide perpetrated in Gaza (notably through the voice of our Editor-at-Large for Palestine, Carol Khoury).
The potentially rich and far-reaching ambivalence of the festival’s theme was again apparent in another conversation and presentation that was among my favorites. Something that in certain ways unites the city and the countryside, crossing human history like a red thread and emerging as a subject of critical if not apocalyptic impact in recent times is. . . garbage—yet it has hardly ever been brought into academic and writerly focus. Roman Köster made up for this oversight in his bulky, fascinating Müll (Rubbish), and in a riveting exchange with Klaus Taschwer, Köster casually delivered some of the main contributions of this book—such as a relevant periodization of garbage throughout human history, paired with some memorable milestones. For instance, he discussed how cholera before WWII was linked to poor hygiene caused by garbage, and how cancer post-WWII emerged as a result of literally trashy industrial food processing and packaging. In a laid-back, tongue-in-cheek style, he also provided tidbits of compelling trivia, such as the fact that ancient Rome was not, as the traditional cliché would have it, the city of seven hills. An eighth hill lay just outside its gates, continuously growing every day: the first massive landfill in European history.
Once again, ELit 2024 reminded me of the festival’s long-standing and deeply rooted connection to music. As I mentioned in last year’s dispatch, the festival’s drivers themselves are outstanding artists; the individual whom I met last year as a member of Takeshi’s Cashew was about to embark on an Indian tour soon after he dropped me off at the airport, while another driver had no fewer than three bands. On the last night, the group Trio Lumi charmed the festival audience with their mix of pan-European folklore and jazzy improv, and one of the main attractions on the program was a music tour of Krems and its Danube promenade, given by music journalist and Ö1 presenter Albert Hosp. A surprising connection to Mozart’s biography occasioned by the walk was only surpassed by one of Schubert’s refrains that seemed to have been written specially for the festival: “Ade, Du muntre, Du fröhliche Stadt, Ade!” Farewell, you cheerful, you happy city, farewell!
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. His latest edited collection is Literature and Computation (Routledge 2014) and A Computationally Assembled Anthology of Contemporary Belgian Poetry (Peter Lang, 2025) is forthcoming.
Photo © Elisabeth Stecker / Europäische Literaturtage
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