Literary spring in the homeland of the Brothers Grimm
The literary spring in the homeland of the Brothers Grimm is a literature festival in Northern Hesse that has been taking place annually in March or April since 2012. It usually lasts ten days and offers around two dozen events of various kinds. The focus is on current German-language new publications, namely literary works as well as non-fiction or crime novels. They are presented by the authors, sometimes also by actors. The festival's patrons are Mario Adorf and Friedrich Christian Delius .
history
The festival was founded in spring 2012 by three hotels in the north Hessian district of Waldeck-Frankenberg , the Hotel Die Sonne Frankenberg, the Hotel Schloss Waldeck and the Landhaus Bärenmühle in Ellershausen. The occasion was the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm , which was published in December 1812th Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm lived in Kassel at that time and had collected the material for their fairy tales there and in the north Hessian area of the landgrave's residence town. The initiators of the festival managed to win around 20 companies and institutions from the region as supporters, which made the organization and financing of the festival possible in the first place. "We see ourselves as a special kind of cultural citizens' initiative that aims to promote the region and give residents and guests an intensive cultural week once a year," says journalist and writer Christiane Kohl , who is responsible for the program and the process.
The offer met with a positive response right from the start and attracted not only interested parties from the Waldeck-Frankenberg region and the greater Marburg-Kassel-Göttingen area, but also from North Rhine-Westphalia and other parts of Germany all the way to Berlin. The number of visitors doubled to more than 3,000 within a few years. In September 2017, Christiane Kohl was awarded the culture prize of the Waldeck-Frankenberg district as the representative of the organizers.
concept
The events mostly take place in the rooms of the three hotels, but sometimes also in unusual locations such as the baroque hall of Schloss Friedrichstein in Bad Wildungen or in a former cowshed in the village of Ellershausen. From the beginning it was important to the organizers to reach not only those interested in literature but also people who still have certain fears about the “high literature”. This was achieved, for example, by combining readings from sophisticated literary works with a dinner. The chefs of the three hotels tried to raise awareness of the time, the milieu and the atmosphere of the novel in culinary terms. In addition, “literary carriage rides” were offered through a meadow valley, during which an actress read texts from the Grimm brothers' epoch.
The stage shows in a former cowshed in Ellershausen, where the Frankfurt theater and action artist Michael Quast presented texts by the first Dadaists (2016) and the reformer Martin Luther (2017) on the occasion of centenary anniversaries , also proved to be a special attraction . In 2018 he made the disappearance of insects a literary subject. Year after year, the organizers set a special accent with a regional theme, often related to the Brothers Grimm, as well as with a political event. The special presentations that some of the invited authors give every year for school classes from Frankenau, Frankenberg (Eder), Korbach and Bad Wildungen were also very popular.
Authors, performers, moderators
The guests of the festival since 2012 have included authors, but also actors and presenters. Among them were Mario Adorf, Adriana Altaras, Eva Gesine Baur, Iris Berben, Christian Berkel, Kurt Biedenkopf, Heiner Boehncke, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, Nora Bossong, Friedrich Christian Delius, Giovanni di Lorenzo, Thea Dorn, John von Düffel, Christine Eichel, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Matthias Faltz, Julia Franck, Marjana Gaponenko, Martina Gedeck, Helene Grass, Durs Grünbein, Frank Günther, Axel Hacke, Anna Katharina Hahn, Nino Harati wili, Josef Haslinger, Elke Heidenreich, Wolfgang Herles, Rainer von Hessen, Thomas Hettche, Barbara Honigmann, Wladimir Kaminer, Jürgen Kaube, Hans Werner Kilz, Klaus Kinkel, Tatjana Kinkel, Bodo Kirchhoff, Wolfgang Kraushaar, Michael Krüger, Josef Joffe, Johannes Kühn, Charles Lewinsky, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Christine Lieberknecht, Felicitas von Lovenberg, Paul Maar, Monika Maron, Ahmad Mansour, Steffen Martus, Hubertus Meyer-Buckhardt, Klaus Modick, Petra Morsbach, Martin Mosebach, Jürgen Neffe, Annette Neubauer, Ingrid Noll, Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Claudia Ott, Hans Pleschinski, Katarina Poladjan, Olaf Pyras, Michael Quast, Ulrich Raulff, Josef H. Reichholf, Petra Reski, Heinz Rölleke, Marianne Sägebrecht, Udo Samel, Hans Sarkowicz, Joachim Sartorius, Denis Scheck, Asta Scheib, Albert Schindehütte, Peter Schneider, Walter Sittler, Peter Sloterdijk, Reiner Stach, Saša Stanišić, Andreas Steinhöfel, Stephan Thome, Ilija Trojanow, Guntram Vesper, Sahra Wagenknecht, Jan Wagner, Martin Walker, Martin Walser, Willi Winkler, Felicitas Woll, Feridun Zaimoglu, Hanns Zischler and Brigitte Zypries.