dream landscapes

Venue: Ranked Foyer - With Die Holländerinnen, Dorothee Elmiger has written a novel about the incomprehensible, about the shadow of guilt that leads to the edges of civilization and tracks down European violence in the thickets of the jungles of Panama.

Based on Elmiger's story, the multi-award-winning writer Terézia Mora meets the “trauma researcher” Malek Bajbouj. Both explore traumatic experiences in different ways, which often elude a normal, closed narrative. Trauma is characterized precisely by the fact that an event cannot be easily integrated into a coherent story. How can we talk about it anyway?

Trauma, violence and strangeness are among the central themes in Terézia Mora's work. In books such as Alle Tage, Das Ungeheuer or Muna oder die Half des Lebens, she translated the indescribable into language and in the form of a text — and explored the limits of literary representability. She is currently writing a book whose starting point is family trauma related to the expulsion of her German-speaking family from Hungary.

Malek Bajbouj is a psychiatrist and neurologist and often treats refugees with traumatic experiences. He is concerned with the question of whether traumas can be healed even though their damage is apparently inherited. As part of his work, he uses methods of narrative exposure therapy, a therapeutic method of autobiographical narration, to resolve trauma.

What happens to memories when something is so violent that it eludes a story? And how are such experiences written in people, communities and subsequent generations? How can we recognize and break the cycle of suffering and violence? And what opportunities does literary writing open up?