Award-winning author Barbara Honigmann on Jewish life in Europe

Why did the German-Jewish writer Barbara Honigmann emigrate from East Berlin to Strasbourg in 1984? How does she write about Jewish life between orthodoxy and modernity? And why is it important to her to speak, tell and write about the ‘juif inauthentique’ (Jean-Paul Sartre)?

At the invitation of the European Foundation Aachen Cathedral (ESAD), Barbara Honigmann will be reading two chapters from her book ‘Das Gesicht wiederfinden’ on

It is about Jewish life in Europe in the past and present: on the one hand, using the example of the Jewish Slavicist Etty Hillesum in occupied Holland in 1941/42, who in a desperate situation sought a faith between Jewish and Christian texts, and on the other hand, using the example of her own Jewish studies in Strasbourg, the ‘Jerusalem of the West’. Following the reading, the author will talk to literature professor Michael Braun about her experiences and observations as well as her writing.

Barbara Honigmann, born in 1949 as the child of Jewish emigrants in East Berlin, worked as a dramaturge and director at the Volksbühne and Deutsches Theater in Berlin in the 1970s. In 1984, she immigrated with her family to the Jewish community in Strasbourg. Since 1986, she has published prose, novels and essays, most recently the father book ‘Georg’ and the essay collections ‘Das Gesicht wiederfinden’ and ‘Unverschämt jüdisch’. Honigmann, said the President of the Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, Prof Dr Raphael Gross, at the Adenauer Foundation’s 2022 Literature Prize Award Ceremony, provides enlightenment from an extremely marginal historical constellation: ‘About false historical narratives. About false concealment. About false assumptions. About completely false shame.’
Admission to the reading is free, registration is not required.