Michael Roes

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Michael Roes (born August 7, 1960 in Rhede / Westphalia) is a German writer , novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, anthropologist and filmmaker.

Michael Roes at a reading at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012

Life

Michael Roes grew up in Bocholt . After graduating from high school, he studied psychology , philosophy and German at the Free University of Berlin , where he obtained his diploma in psychology in 1985.

From 1987 to 1989 he was assistant director and dramaturge at the Berlin Schaubühne and the Münchner Kammerspiele . A study visit to the Negev desert followed . In 1991 Roes received his doctorate with a thesis on Isaac and thus became a doctor of philosophy.

In 1993 Michael Roes became a Fellow at the Collegium Budapest . In 1994/1995 he spent a year in Yemen as part of an ethnological research project. He processed his ethnological studies there in the novel Rub 'al-Khali . In the following years Roes traveled mainly to America and lived for a long time in New York, where he worked on his novel Der Coup der Berdache and his literary travel essay Skin of the South . In 2000 Roes shot his first feature film Someone is Sleeping in my Pain in New York and Yemen , an Arabic “ Macbeth ”. This was followed by several long stays in Algeria, during which the novel Weg nach Timimoun , the film City of Happiness , a documentation of the everyday life of Algerian youth, and Roes' second feature film Timimoun , an Algerian Oresty , were made.

In 2004 and 2006/2007 Michael Roes was invited to a visiting professorship at the Central European University , Budapest , where he worked with students on his film project Elevation, among other things . This was followed by a three-month stay in Nanjing and work on the novel The Five Colors of Black , which was published in autumn 2009. From 2012 to 2013 Michael Roes was a Research Fellow at the International Research College Entanglement of Theater Cultures at the Free University of Berlin . He is a member of the PEN Center Germany .

Works

Michael Roes always tries to interact with the stranger. His literary and cinematic work is based on the examination of very different cultures, from the North American Indians in the novel Der Coup der Berdache , to contemporary China in The Five Colors of Black , the Welsh myths in Lleu Llaw Gyffes , to the Islamic world in the novels Rub 'al-Khali / Empty Quarter , Way to Timimoun , Nah Inverness and History of Friendship . His work is characterized by syncretism and the desire to experiment.

  • In the novel Rub 'al-Khali / Empty Quarter , published in 1996, the protagonist is an anthropologist who wants to research traditional children's games and dances in Yemen. His diary is a juxtaposition of travelogues, everyday observations and reflections on the game. Another, complementary narrative strand of the novel consists of the diary of a Yemen traveler from the early nineteenth century, Alois Ferdinand Schnittke. Schnittke's report is characterized by his sensitivity to local customs and an enlightening attitude towards the Arab world. Both diaries are closely intertwined.
  • In the volume of poetry Durus Arabij, Arabic Lessons (1997), Michael Roes conveys an intercultural sound image. The Israeli composer Amos Elkana set 13 poems from this collection to music.
  • Nah Inverness , published in 2004, also works with two corresponding diary strands. Hal Dumblatt, an American director, is obsessed with the idea of ​​a Macbeth film with Yemeni tribal warriors as actors. The second narrative level consists of reports from Ahmed, a Yemeni officer who accompanies the film crew and possibly reports to the Yemeni secret service. - The novel is based on authentic experiences: In 2000, Michael Roes traveled to Yemen with a small film crew to shoot his version of Macbeth with the title Someone is Sleeping in my Pain (2001).
  • From 2003 to 2006 Michael Roes worked on another double project: Timimoun. Algeria on several trips the documentary initially created city of happiness ( City of Happiness 2003/2004) and the feature film Timimoun (2004/2005), an Algerian road movie, based on the Greek myths to Agamemnon and Orestes.
  • The novel Weg nach Timimoun (2006) largely follows the script and tells the story of Laid, a young photographer who is asked by his sister Assia to avenge her mother's murder of her father. Laid and his friend Nadir set off on an adventurous journey from the coastal town of Bejaia to the desert.
  • In 2006 Roes shot his third feature film Elevation with the two main actors from Timimoun as part of a visiting professorship at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest . The script is based on Roes' first play Aufriss (first performance at the Theater der Stadt Koblenz in 1992) and shows the hopeless situation of two refugees on the borders of Europe in sparse black and white pictures.
  • In 2009 Michael Roes published his China novel Die Fünf Farben Schwarz , which tells of the trip of the Leipzig rhetoric professor Viktor Holz to Nanjing in China. The memories and reflections of the first-person narrator are interwoven with a philosophical essay on death in 59 parts and a multitude of observations on everyday life in China.
  • In the novel History of Friendship (2010), Roes returns to Algeria and tells the story of the friendship between Matthias, a Berlin doctor, and the Algerian student Yanis, an emotionally and culturally extremely difficult relationship between two men who come from completely different worlds and try to live the impossible: an encounter with the foreign without expropriating the foreign.
  • From two perspectives, framed by the near-death experience a downhill racing bike ride to the bank of the Vistula, Michael Roes told in The sounds the history of Yemeni boys Asis. One describes the boy's school days in Aden, the awakening of the sign poet. In the other, Asis himself tells of his work on an opera about the competition between Apollo and the Faun Marsyas. He lives in Kraków's industrial district Nowa Huta, studied for a few years with the Polish composer Adam Twardowski and sorts air freight at night at the airport. - "Asis listens with his whole body. Brute frequencies are condensed into Martian music in his opera. Roes designs a gestural poetics of horror, brings the mythical material" on air "again. The novel leads into primal scenes of narration and being touched", writes Hans Hütt in the taz. - The novel was nominated for the German Book Prize in 2012.
  • Like the novel The Five Colors of Black , The Legend of the White Snake also plays in Nanjing, but this time the 20-year-old actor, breakdancer, skater and graffiti artist Jian is at the center of the action. "It gives the reader an insight into the upheavals in modern China, which has yet to find its way between tradition and modernity," explains Tobias Schmidt on literaturkritik.de. "It is thanks to Michael Roes' highly reflective way of writing that this does not lead to clichéd images and descriptions, as it confidently navigates around common places and generalizations in all of his books and thus connects familiar and new perspectives."
  • "A Prussian love story" is what Michael Roes calls his novel biography Zeithain about Hans Hermann von Katte , the friend of the Prussian Crown Prince Friedrich. The fact that this story is neither historically transfigured nor romantically kitsch is due to the narrative style of »Zeithain«: In a contemporary level, the first-person narrator Philipp Stanhope has come across a few letters from Katte to his aunt Melusine von der Schulenburg and sets off for them Look for the places that defined Katte. His current experiences fade into Katte's life story, which is told with great calm, sometimes authorially, sometimes from a first-person perspective. This search for traces in the past is actually a search for oneself - "and strangely, it is the present of Philipp Stanhope that seems magically charged and sometimes fabulous, while the real story of Hans Hermann von Katte tells it clearly, rationally and enlightened will, "comments Veit Schubert for the magazine" crew ". - "Roes succeeds in the feat," writes Judith von Sternburg in the Frankfurter Rundschau, "to give Katte a language that is adequate for him, at least one that is convincing about himself and his narrative position. Sober as himself, observing carefully, whereby Katte himself does not register, how sensitive he is. "Zeithain" is an autobiography in diary-like real time. "

In all novels and films, intercultural encounters are portrayed as extremely complex and fragile. A fundamental idea in Michael Roes' thinking is the conviction that what people share in common experiences is greater than what separates them from one another. Language and culture can be an obstacle to communication, but the experience of our physical sensations go deeper: "The reasons for the differences in thinking are not in the intellectual abilities, but in the different languages," says the Empty Quarter . “But we can communicate. Because together we have our body. It is not cultures that meet, but faces, smells, voices. "

In addition to race and gender, gender issues and the problem of the sacrifice of the son, he also repeatedly addresses the issue of validity, especially in his essays ( War and Dance , Berlin 2007; Perversion and Glück , Berlin 2007, Engel and Avatar , Berlin 2011) Objectivity claim of scientific literature. In a postmodern style, he lifts the boundaries of science and literature and points to the questionable nature of standard models and the plural constitution of reality.

Publications

Theater premieres

  • Elevation . Theater of the City of Koblenz, 1992.
  • Cham . Schauspielhaus Cologne 1993.
  • Majnun Al-Malik . Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, 1998.
  • Durus Arabij . Berliner Festwochen, 1998.
  • Cain . Elegie Hebbel Theater, International Poetry Festival Berlin, 2004.
  • The coup of the Berdache . Palace of the Republic, Berlin, 2004.

Features

  • A short summer in Tichy. Diary of a trip to the rebellious Kabylia . Radio feature, SWR Baden-Baden, WDR Cologne, 2003.
  • The internet harem . Radio feature. WDR, Cologne 2005.
  • Way to Timimoun . Radio feature. SWR, 2007.

Filmography

  • Abdallah and Adrian . Documentary, Yemen 1996.
  • Someone is Sleeping in My Pain . Feature film, Yemen / USA 2000.
  • City of Happiness . Documentary, Algeria, 2003/2004
  • Phaidra.Remade , film essay, Budapest 2004.
  • Timimoun . Feature film, Algeria, 2004/2005
  • Elevation . Feature film, Hungary, 2006.
  • Breakdance in China . Documentary, China 2007/2012
  • Bardo . Feature film, Tunisia 2016

Scholarships and Awards

literature

  • Juliane Rytz: The imagery of the skin in Michael Roes' "Skin of the South". In: Villigster Werkstatt Interdisciplinarity (Ed.): Skin between inside and outside. Organ - surface - discourse. (= Villigst Profile. Volume 12). LIT Verlag, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-643-10261-4 .
  • Christoph Schmitt-Maaß: The endangered subject . Self-research and research on others in contemporary German-language ethnopoeia (Hubert Fichte, Hans Christoph Buch, Michael Roes). 2011, ISBN 978-3-939381-28-0 .
  • Mark Thornton Burnett: Shakespeare and World Cinema. Cambridge University Press, 2012. In his work , Mark Thornton Burnett explores the significance of Shakespeare in contemporary cinema beyond the Hollywood mainstream and also dedicates an extensive chapter to Roes' Yemeni Macbeth film "Someone is Sleeping in my Pain".
  • Diana Pachur: Literary Bridges in the 'Arab World'. European identity, Arab alterity and interculturality with Michael Roes, Ilija Trojanow and Stefan Weidner. Karlsruhe (KIT library) 2014
  • Herbert Uerlings: Abraham and the sacrifice of culture. On the criticism of an oriental master story in Michael Roes' "Jizchak" . In Axel Dunker and Michael Hofmann (eds.): Morgenland und Moderne. Orient Discourses in German-Language Literature from 1890 to the Present. Frankfurt a. M. 2014, ISBN 978-3-653-99425-4 .
  • Seiriol Dafydd: Intercultural and Intertextual Encounters in Michael Roes's Travel Fiction. Bithell Series of Dissertations Book 42; 2015.
  • Godwin Kornes: Michael Roes' novel Empty Quarter as a document of reflexive ethnology [9]
  • Markus Huss: Inscribed gestures: the vernacular-cosmopolitan dynamic of sign language in Michael Roes's novel "Die Lute" [10]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Christoph Schmitt-Maaß: Michael Roes - Essay , KLG - Critical Lexicon for Contemporary German Literature, in the Munzinger Archive , accessed on December 16, 2011 ( beginning of the article freely available)
  2. ↑ "Michael Roes" ( Memento of the original from April 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at spycher-literaturpreis.ch, accessed on May 14, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.spycher-literaturpreis.ch
  3. ↑ grin.com
  4. ↑ amoselkana.com
  5. ^ Tomas Niederberghaus: Shakespeare, dangerously wacky. In: Zeit Online 06/2001. February 1, 2001, accessed May 5, 2014 .
  6. ↑ a rede ex aequo (forum)
  7. ↑ kino.de
  8. ↑ Michael Roes way to Timimoun on pearl divers
  9. ↑ 38th Mülheimer Theatertage NRW - The plays of a year in the competition for the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis
  10. ↑ Film premiere: "Elevation"
  11. ↑ elevation. A film by Michael Roes
  12. ↑ de-cn.net ( Memento from April 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ dradio.de
  14. ↑ [1]
  15. ↑ [2]
  16. ↑ [3]
  17. ↑ [4]
  18. ↑ Rub 'al-Khali / Empty Quarter. Frankfurt 1996.
  19. ↑ [5]
  20. ^ "Michael Roes receives Alice Salomon Poetics Prize" , poeten'laden.de, October 30, 2006.
  21. ↑ Michael Roes at literaturport.de, accessed on May 15, 2015.
  22. ↑ Understanding without language at matthes-seitz-berlin.de, accessed on May 15, 2015.
  23. ↑ 20.6. 2013 / Spycher: Leuk Literature Prize to Mircea Cartarescu and Michael Roes. ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at spycher-literaturpreis.ch/, accessed on May 15, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.spycher-literaturpreis.ch
  24. ↑ [6]
  25. ↑ [7]
  26. ↑ [8]
personal data
SURNAME Roes, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Roadstead