Der Literarische Salon - Eva Menasse: Alleinruhelage

Eva Menasse (author) Navid Kermani (host) Guy Helminger (host)

Tickets

We’ve been waiting a long time for a new novel by Eva Menasse, who—ever since her acclaimed debut *Vienna*—has captivated us time and again with her wit and insight, literary mastery, and unflinching understanding of human nature. Her most recent novel, “Dunkelblum,” published in 2021, was another bestseller and has been translated into many languages. But most recently, Menasse has made a name for herself above all with her insightful commentary on freedom of expression and the digital age, Gaza, and antisemitism. She also co-founded PEN Berlin. Hardly any other public intellectual in the German-speaking world today attracts as much attention as the author, who was born in Vienna in 1970—even though she stays away from Twitter and talk shows. At her core, she has, of course, remained a writer, having been honored with awards including the Böll Prize, the Austrian Booksellers’ Honorary Prize, and the Hölderlin Prize. This makes us all the more eager to read her new novel: “Alleinruhelage.” It’s about a marriage that has fallen apart, but really it’s a midlife assessment of the life we cling to, even if it fails to live up to any of its promises.

The salon will take place at the Kulturkirche Nippes.
In cooperation with lit.Cologne spezial.

Further information

Venue:

Stadtgarten

The first concert in the newly built Stadtgarten concert hall in the mid-1980s launched a program unlike anything Germany had seen: an independent, artistically driven concert series devoted to contemporary improvised music. It was guided neither by attendance figures nor by public subsidies, yet it guaranteed musicians minimum fees and was run on professional terms. The conditions mattered just as much: an acoustically optimized, street-level concert space offering a strong setting for audiences and performers alike. Operations were financed through the adjoining hospitality business, the Stadtgarten restaurant and beer garden, a model that drew attention well beyond Germany.

Today the Stadtgarten Köln ranks among Europe's internationally recognized venues for contemporary and improvised music. The American magazine Down Beat features it regularly in its listings; it has received Germany's federal APPLAUS venue program award several times, including "Venue of the Year" in 2016, followed by the German Jazz Prize in the same category in 2022. More than 400 events across the full spectrum of contemporary music now take place there each year. Its international standing rests above all on the high proportion of demanding, experimental programming.

A programming mission of this kind depends on reliable public support. The venue's 30th anniversary in September 2016 opened that prospect: through a partnership between the City of Cologne and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, programming work is being substantially strengthened, and from 2017 onward the Stadtgarten Köln is being developed step by step into a "European Center for Jazz and Contemporary Music" – with the goal of becoming one of Europe's leading music centers.

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