The award-winning author on literary writing and reading literature
Those who want to write must also be able to read: Katja Lange-Müller reports on her own writing process and on the secrets of her great “colleagues” – from Herman Melville, Johann Peter Hebel, Mark Twain and Heinrich von Kleist to Adolf Endler and Wolfgang Hilbig.
As a writer whose books combine literary brilliance with stunning humor, Katja Lange-Müller is a godsend for German contemporary literature. She once again pulls off this artistic feat in the Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics (2016), in which she spoke about literary writing, reading literature, her own literary biography and above all the short story as literary genre – one that she regards very highly. In the process, Katja Lange-Müller takes us on a journey through world literature all the way to the present. She illuminates the “bouillon-cube principle” (that is, the extreme condensation that distinguishes the greatest stories in world literature), the origin of comedy as the weapon of the weak against the strong and the perennially topical question of “when are we dealing with literature” (and when are we not).
