Würzburg is reading a book
Würzburg reads a book is a reading festival that has been held every two years since 2014 in Würzburg and the Main Franconia region .
background
It is organized by the Würzburg Reads Association. The initiative for the city reading campaign came from the local book trade, which founded a working group and the association together with local authors, actors and literature lovers. The aim of the campaign is to make a book a topic of conversation and a communal experience for everyone in the city of Würzburg every year. The inspiration for this came from projects that had been carried out since 2002 in cities such as Hamburg, Potsdam and Bad Hersfeld under the guiding principle “ A city reads a book ”. The program includes around 100 public events, including readings, exhibitions, guided tours, as well as film and theater performances. The novels selected so far by authors of the 20th century have been selected under the aspect that they have to do with the identity of the city of Würzburg. A school competition invites students from all types of schools to examine the selected literature.
To the book selection
So far, the selection has focused specifically on books by authors whose life and fate have a closer relationship to Würzburg or who have dealt with historical facts from the history of Würzburg in their books. The books should appeal less to the literary specialist audience than to a broader public. Readers should be encouraged to make their own statements in a literary-critical examination of current issues of the time.
Leonhard Frank , whose books were burned by the Nazis, describes in his book Die Jünger Jesu, which was published after the war, “the terrible post-war period with the help of many individual fates. Books like this remind us of this time that should not be forgotten. ”Frank himself, who returned to his hometown Würzburg in 1950 after 17 years of exile , felt“ like a traveling salesman ”,“ whose goods are no good ”Because“ the young Federal Republic does not want to know anything about him. ”With his book Die Jünger Jesu he had“ stung a wasp's nest ”. Issues such as the Shoah and denazification aroused - and continue to excite - many of his opponents.
Several storylines are interwoven into a tableau: Würzburg 1946: A gang of young people steals from the rich and distributes the scarce goods to the neediest who live in the ruins of the destroyed city, while a rival group tries to revive the past. The daughter of a perpetrator falls in love with an American soldier. A Jewish woman returns to her hometown traumatized and seeks revenge on her parents' murderer. Schools and working groups have opened up to this topic. For example, the Friends of the Station Mission "showed in an impressive way how much the" disciples of Jesus "have to do with the work of the station mission."
Jakob Wassermann's book Der Aufruhr um den Junker Ernst is just as topical as Frank's account . The Franconian landscape around Würzburg, the story of the witch hunt in Würzburg and his own exclusion as a Jew in Germany, Wassermann condensed into an exciting story in the novella from 1926 . Guiding ideas such as storytelling as an art, resistance to prejudice and overcoming ignorance have resulted in a book that is still topical today. The author Jakob Wassermann - according to Thomas Mann a storyteller of blood and instinct: "None of us is like him" - was "one of the most important and successful writers before 1933. His novels ended up at the stake of the Nazi book burners . Aquarius is worth rediscovering. ”In addition to the already tried and tested activities in schools, the reading campaign included literary lectures, which were published in book form in 2017.
With the book by Jehuda Amichai Not from now, not from here , another book is the focus of “Würzburg reads a book”, which was hardly known until now and is waiting to be discovered. Just in time for the start of the event, a Würzburg publisher presented an inexpensive new edition. The action takes place in Würzburg, the time: 1959. The Israeli archaeologist Joel, driven by the longing for the city of his childhood and thoughts of revenge, sets off for his native city of Würzburg. Or will he stay in Jerusalem to lose himself in love with the American Patricia? The poet Jehuda Amichai, born in Würzburg in 1924, can easily be recognized behind the literary person of Joel, who deals with the forgetting of history in Germany at the time of the economic miracle as well as in the young state of Israel. In the memory passages, Amichai paints an atmospheric picture of Jewish life in Würzburg before the Shoah. The two narrative threads set in Würzburg and Jerusalem make it clear in their close interweaving: the past can only be mastered by integrating it into the present.
In 2020, the aim of the planned reading campaign is to "bring a forgotten author and his work to the attention of the citizens of the city and region". The Jewish writer Max Mohr , born in Würzburg in 1891, lived as a doctor and author in Munich, Wolfsgrub am Tegernsee and Berlin until he emigrated to Shanghai (1934), triggered by National Socialism. With a total of five novels and twelve successful plays, he was one of the well-known authors of the Weimar Republic. His last novel Woman Without Regret is about the situation of a woman between the loneliness of the mountains and the big city. It is obvious that Mohr portrayed himself in the person of the scholar Paul Fenn, who is unable to realize his lofty plans and who ultimately dies on a climbing tour in the Alps. The blurb of the first edition published in 1933 by S. Fischer Verlag reads: "Mohrs people all live with a primordial darkness behind them. They follow an urge from the unconscious on their way. It is the fear, the feeling of being cut off, that from the ebb , the emptiness of the world comes what drives them on restless wanderings. They flee from the falsities of the time. " It cannot be dismissed out of hand to see such thoughts against the background of the political landslide of January 30, 1933, and so the organizers of "Würzburg reads a book" ask the legitimate question: "Is our world today different from the one in the world? Germany in 1933 really as strong as we would like it to be? What about the relationship between the sexes, the position of people in the technological world and national tendencies in the population? "
Previous events
| year | Book title | author | Year of first edition |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | The disciples of Jesus | Leonhard Frank | 1949 |
| 2016 | The uproar over the junker Ernst | Jacob Wassermann | 1926 |
| 2018 | Not from now, not from here | Yehuda Amichai | 1992 (Hebrew: 1963) |
| 2020 | Woman with no regrets | Max Mohr | 1933 |
See also
Web links
- Würzburg is reading a book. Official website. Würzburg reads e. V., accessed on February 16, 2018 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ literary blog "paper whisper"
- ↑ Literature blog "Schreibdasauf" ( Memento of the original from February 20, 2018 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.
- ^ Homepage of the Würzburg station mission
- ^ Publication by the Bavarian State Library in Munich
- ↑ Eric Hilgendorf, Daniel Osthoff, Martina Weis-Dalal (eds.): Vernunft gegen Hexenwahn. Contribution to Jacob Wassermann's short story 'Der Aufruhr um den Junker Ernst' . Königshausen & Neumann , Würzburg 2017. ISBN 978-3-8260-6312-1 .
- ↑ Yehuda Amichai: Not from now, not from here . Königshausen & Neumann , Würzburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-8260-6206-3 .
- ↑ https://wuerzburg-liest.de/
- ↑ https://wuerzburg-liest.de/
