Dresden Poetry Lectureship on Central European Literature

Project description:

The Chair of Modern German Literature and the Chair of Slavic Literature at the TUD Dresden University of Technology, the Dresden Literature Office and the Dresden Cultural Foundation of Dresdner Bank established the Dresden Poetry Lectureship in 1997.

The Dresden Poetry Lectureship is dedicated to the literature of Central Europe, as befits this cultural landscape, which today is characterized by the nation states of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Every year, a German, a Czech and a Polish writer will take turns to speak in Dresden about the conditions and experiences of their writing.

Organization:
Prof. Dr. Walter Schmitz
Prof. Dr. Ludger Udolph (Institute for Slavic Studies)
Ulrich Fröschle

Funding:
Budget funds and third-party funds
(Cultural Foundation of Dresdner Bank)

The Czech writer, translator and cultural editor Petr Borkovec took over the fifth Poetics Lectureship in the summer semester of 2003.

Petr Borkovec, born in 1970, describes everyday life in Prague in his poems and deals with the social upheaval in Czechoslovakia. He has published five volumes of poetry since 1980, including "Umgang" ("Ochoz", 1994), "Zwischen Fenster, Tisch und Bett" ("Mezí oknem, stolem a postelí", 1996) and "Feldarbeit" ("Polní práce", 1998). Petr Borkovec received the prestigious Jirí Orten Poetry Prize in 1995 and the Hermann Lenz Prize in 2002.

The first lectures as part of the Dresden Poetry Lectureship were given in January 1998 by the writer Gert Neumann (born 1942), who now lives in Berlin.

A monograph by Gert Neumann accompanying these lectures was published in 1999 by the Dresden w.e.b./Thelem Verlag
under the title Verhaftet with an introductory essay by Martin Walser.

The second holder of the Dresden Poetry Lectureship on Central European Literature was the Czech author and diplomat Jiri Grusa.
The book containing Grusa's lectures was also published by w.e.b./Thelem Dresden in February 2000:
Jirí Grusa: The Face - the Writer - the Case. Lectures on the pretension of poets, competence and the present tense as the tense of poetry.
With an introductory essay by Utz Rachowski and an afterword by Ludger Udolph.

As part of the 3rd Dresden Poetry Lectureship on Central European Literature in April 2000, the Polish writer and literary scholar Stefan Chwin gave an insight into his poetic workshop in the ballroom of the Kulturrathaus Dresden.

For 2001, Peter Härtling was invited as lecturer for the Central European Poetry Lectureship.
Peter Härtling, born on November 13, 1933 in Chemnitz, worked as an editor at the "Deutsche Zeitung" from 1955 to 1962, as co-editor of the magazine "Der Monat" from 1962 to 1970, as chief editor from 1967 to 1968 and then finally as managing director of S. Fischer Verlag until the end of 1973. Since the beginning of 1974, he has lived as a freelance writer near Frankfurt am Main. In 1995 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.