28th Leukerbad International Literary Festival
Festival Focus
This year’s festival focuses:
Feature: James Baldwin in Leukerbad
Teju Cole: Blind Spot
Zugunruhe/Migratory Restlessness: Translation Colloquium with Levin Westermann
Feature: James Baldwin in Leukerbad
Leukerbad and international literature – this connection began long before the Leukerbad International Literary Festival was founded in 1966. A traditional account of the village’s literary history would mention that Goethe spent a night here and that Guy de Maupassant set his gruesome story The Inn in the Schwarenbach Hotel high above Leukerbad. But in recent years, another story has slowly but insistently made its way into general awareness:
Leukerbad, the small spa village in the Upper Valais, is the place James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) describes in his essay Stranger in the Village. The essay was later included in the collection Notes of a Native Son. In it, Baldwin recalls his experiences in 1950s Leukerbad and compares the racism that he encountered as the first Black man to come to the village with the racism he had faced in the United States and in France.
He relates how the children confront him, initially driven by the question of whether or not his color would rub off. Later he becomes friends with some of them and he recounts the churchgoers’ honest solicitude for the souls of black folk through their Lenten fund. Whereas in the village of Leukerbad with a population of 600 at the time, Baldwin encounters a racism based primarily on ignorance, in his homeland he experiences humiliation, denigration, and the presumption of white privileges. Still, he remains a stranger in both situations.
James Baldwin’s stays in Leukerbad enabled him to finish his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. Here he found the quiet he needed to write; here the distractions of the big city were far enough away. For his 100th birthday, we have dedicated a feature to him.
Photography exhibition June 14 – 30, 2024: In 2014, Teju Cole followed Baldwin’s traces in Leukerbad and he recorded his impressions in the essay Black Bodies. By linking texts and images in his project Blind Spot, Teju Cole uncovers hidden power structures – many of the texts and images originated in Switzerland. These works were first displayed in 2018 in the Strauhof Museum (Zurich) and they will now be shown in Leukerbad.
Multimedia reading with Rolf Hermann: Rolf Hermann uses images and sound to bring to life 1950s Leukerbad and the experiences of the stranger in the village.
Village walk with Sasha Huber: Sasha Huber takes us to Burg Hüsli, the chalet where James Baldwin stayed in Leukerbad and where she painted his portrait with metal staples (the artwork adorns the cover of this year’s program booklet).
Baldwin anew, please!: Miriam Mandelkow has taken on an enormous task. She is re-translating James Baldwin’s works into German and will speak about this endeavor at the Festival.
James Baldwin 2024: Tash Aw, Teju Cole, and Johny Pitts look at the works of James Baldwin. What meaning does his writing have for them? Where does the discussion of James Baldwin’s themes stand today?
See detailed program for time and place
Zugunruhe/Migratory Restlessness: Translation Colloquium with Levin Westermann
Translators are not only especially attentive readers, they’re also vital intermediaries between languages and cultures. In cooperation with the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB) and with the support of the cultural foundation Pro Helvetia, the Centre de Traduction Littéraire Lausanne (CTL), and Palais Valais, translators of German-language literature from Switzerland have been invited to Leukerbad again this year.
This two-day workshop is always centered on a recent work by a Swiss author: this year it’s Levin Westermann’s prose work
The participants will present the results of the workshop and discuss their work as cultural border crossers at the Leukerbad Literary Festival.
Agnese Grieco is a writer, director, dramaturge, and translator based in Berlin and Milan. She recently published the essay Phaedra’s Honor and has translated works by Thomas Bernhard, Botho Strauß, Erika Mann, and Anne Weber into Italian. agnesegrieco.de
Sandra Ljubas lives in Zagreb and translates Swedish and German-language literature into Croatian, including works by Thilo Krause and Leif Randt.
Katerina Shekutkovska from Skopje/North Macedonai translates German-language literature into Macedonian, including works by Daniel Kehlmann, Lukas Bärfuss, Marion Poschmann, Joseph Vogl, and Jonas Lüscher. She is the founder and editor of Ilika Publisher, Skopje.
Marina Skalova was born in Moscow, grew up in Germany and France, and now lives in Geneva. She writes at the intersections of languages and genres, publishes poetry, and theater plays and translates from German and Russian into French. marinaskalova.net
Dorota Stroińska was born in Poznan and has lived in Berlin since 1986. She has translated Lutz Seiler, Karl Jaspers, Christian Kracht, Nora Gomringer, Monika Rinck, Lisa Kränzler and Adelheid Duvanel into Polish. She leads the German-Polish Vice-Versa workshops and is a co-founder and curator of the Literary Translation Festival translationale Berlin. dorotastroinska.de
Nelya Vakhovska lives in Kiev and is a co-founder of the group “Translators in Action”. She has translated works by Esther Kinsky, Marjana Gaponenko, Franz Hohler, Martin Pollack and Josef Winkler, among others, into Ukrainian.
Jürgen Jakob Becker is the Programming Director of the Literary Colloquium Berlin and the Managing Director of the Deutsche Übersetzerfond. He will lead the Translation Colloquium in Berlin.
Katharina Schwarck is studying at the Literary Translation Center at the University of Lausanne and will assist the workshop.
Previous guest authors of the Translation Colloquium include
Results of the workshop and their work as cultural border crossers:
Saturday, 22 June 2024, 11 am
29th Leukerbad International Literary Festival:
