Wednesday, November 12 at 7:30 pm at the Literaturhaus

Moderator: Shirin Sojitrawalla (DLF and taz)

Series: Tarbut - Time for Jewish Culture

How do you preserve the memory within a family? Ricarda Messner's debut novel "Where the Name Lives" is about this search in one's own family history. In it, the narrator embarks on a search for her Jewish ancestors - all the way back to her great-grandfather in the former Riga ghetto. Of particular importance to the narrator is her grandmother, who appears again and again in her memories. Years earlier, she had moved into her first apartment in the immediate vicinity of her grandmother, and now she has to take care of her estate. It's not just things like cutlery, pots and pans and music cassettes that she wants to preserve, but also the old family name "Levitanus". The desire to take the name back eventually leads her to Riga, and from there over four generations from the Soviet Latvia of the 1970s to present-day Germany.

A novel about the difficult concept of transgenerational trauma, the power of memory and the gaps that sometimes complete the picture.

ORGANIZER: Literaturhaus Villa Clementine/Kulturamt Wiesbaden in cooperation with the Jewish Community Wiesbaden

Friday, November 14 at 7 p.m.

Moderator: Alexander Pfeiffer

Young authors between the ages of 13 and 18 have been meeting weekly at the Literaturhaus Villa Clementine since September to work on their own texts and learn the basics of literary writing. Under the guidance of Wiesbaden writer Alexander Pfeiffer, a wide variety of stories have been created, which "Die Schreibwütigen 2.5" will present in a final reading this evening.

The texts will be published in a reader.