Sanders Isaac Bernstein

I first saw The Klezmer Project, a beautiful film that plays with fiction, history, text & image, urging us to consider culture beyond blood and nation, at Berlinale 2023. @jewishcurrents.bsky.social let me write about it. Thank you, Nathan & Nora, for supporting and editing this labor of years.

Really excited to have published this in THE AUFLAUF, our newest scene, and perhaps the most ambitious piece of writing yet in the magazine: @ajbwells.bsky.social on the last day of Radebeul’s Museum of Lies! www.theauflauf.com/p/scene-alex...

@ajbwells.bsky.social has been talking about going to Dresden's Museum of Lies for years – but only managed it on its very last day. Is truth the only thing left? Our latest SCENE, and one of my favorite things we've published:

"After John Cage has done four and a half minutes of silence, the task of the avant-garde is not to then do five minutes of silence. That’s kitsch." Going to be thinking about @return2sanders.bsky.social's interview with Tom McCarthy whenever anyone talks about experimental literature:

a lovely conversation with Cristina from @minorliteratures.bsky.social! thank you for being interested in thr Auflauf (and putting up with my screaming son)!

Literally just remembered I have a social media account, just in time to share this outstanding series of events of which I am lucky to be a part, coming up this weekend.

meanwhile, check these out ...

Auflauf Auflauf Auflauf Auflauf Auflauf Come celebrate 6 months of the books & culture magazine with us! 7 PM September 19 www.lettretage.de/programm/6-m...

will be reading at The Auflauf 6 Month celebration September 19, 7pm Lettrétage, Berlin

Experimental German poetry, Casanova, Virginia Woolf and John Lanchester's debut novels... Summer reading is looking even more eclectic than usual. What's on your list?

Next month, under the auspices of @cabinetmagazine.bsky.social, Sally O'Reilly et al. will have 10 hours to make a musical about the history of hurrying. As proof of concept, she managed to answer over 10 questions from @return2sanders.bsky.social in 10 minutes:

Carlo Ginzburg est mort, annonce la presse italienne. Immense historien, il a su construire une oeuvre originale entre micro-histoire et anthropologie historique qui a considérablement renouvelé la discipline. www.repubblica.it/cultura/2026...

Tomorrow!

8:30 on Saturday at Lettrétrage (Veteranenstrasse 21): we‘re chatting about the very alive literary legacy of Sebald. There’ll be some convo, some readings, some CRISIS perhaps—but all in all it should be a GOOD TIME!

Looking for new perspectives on German history? This month's reviews: @ajbwells.bsky.social on rock in the GDR, me on Alice Miller's search for her family's story, and John Owen on interwar Weimar (the city, not the republic).

I had the absolute pleasure to speak with Maggie O'Farrell about her excellent new novel, LAND, and how it inadvertently addresses "one of today's most potent political stances: Where do you stand on people arriving in your country or people leaving your country?" www.cntraveler.com/story/for-he...

Fascinating interview by @return2sanders.bsky.social on Herta Müller's poetics, AI, the memory of Communism, and the sticky discomfort of Müller's bad politics:

Wrote about a Dutch East India Company physician's attempt to figure out how acupuncture works – while essentially living on a prison off Nagasaki:

Some great reviews this month: @brynstole.bsky.social on Wolfgang Koeppen's post-war trilogy, @return2sanders.bsky.social on Paul Celan's still-mesmerising ephemera, and myself on Polly Barton's novel of expat life and karaoke and translation:

Two wonderful short pieces by @return2sanders.bsky.social and @marcelkrueger.bsky.social: one about the immanence of early fatherhood, the other about the agonies of facing the past.

Hilda Hoy might just be able to change the way you think about multilingualism, migration and motherhood – I had a wonderful time talking with her about her memoir MOTHER TONGUE, just out from @windandbones.com.

"My god, it took a genocide for people to want to know what's going on." This weekend, Mudar Al-Khufash is staging his lecture-performance Dialectics of Erasure at the Berliner Ringtheater. @return2sanders.bsky.social spoke to him for HEIST www.heistberlin.com/i-am-not-cen...

Here it is, My First Fiction Publication. Big 🩷 to the Auflauf gang. You should subscribe!

A wonderful set of reviews: @ajbwells.bsky.social on poems from Palestine's greatest living poet; @return2sanders.bsky.social on unsettling short prose from the Yenish writer; and @biettetimmons.bsky.social on the book we're all supposed to be reading. (Plus our gossip columnist goes lyrical.)

"I like comics because it’s kind of a bastard medium, and I think graphic narrative theater is too. It’s the vision." Ken Krimstein talked to @return2sanders.bsky.social about writing novel about Hannah Arendt – and then seeing it become a play at the Deutsches Theater.

this looks cool

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Another great set of books this month: Matthew McDonald's debut poetry collection @ajbwells.bsky.social; Julia Franck's autobiographical novel @return2sanders.bsky.social; and Agri Ismaïl's account of dislocation and late capitalism @brynstole.bsky.social. Plus some EXPLOSIVE new gossip...

#Berlin "The Sea Is There, But We Are Not" Literature from #Palestine Reading & conversation with Alaa Alqaisi, Asmaa Azaizeh, Maha El Hissy @mahaelhissy.bsky.social & Ahmed Saleh, music by Cham Saloum Heute Abend ab 19:30 Uhr, Eintritt kostenfrei, Eingang rollstuhlgerecht (leider nicht die WCs)

What's one of the great openings to a story, poem, novel or essay?

interview @ The Auflauf with thanks to @mathildegm.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/theaufla...

@tobiasvryan.bsky.social has written a gross, beautiful, challenging book about a horrible man who won't leave you alone – and I got to talk to him about it for The Auflauf:

Check out The Auflauf, a new substack of Berlin books. Our first course: @mathildegm.bsky.social on Reimann, @brynstole.bsky.social on Clark, & me on Maci. @ajbwells.bsky.social is in the kitchen too helping cook and dish up lit crit, goss & conversations: theauflauf.substack.com

Have all the haters just forgotten about freemasonry?

Heute um 14 Uhr !

A few thoughts about the NYT critics shakeup: Theater is one of the hardest of all disciplines to cover as a critic (or reporter). You need to know its language and history. And there's a ton you can and should do to educate yourself. But you can never "catch up." You can't see what you didn't see.>

On Florentina Holzinger’s latest opera, by @return2sanders.bsky.social‬

Dass der Zentralrat besorgt ist vom Beschluss der @die-linke.de, die IHRA-Arbeitsdefinition abzulehnen und die Jerusalem Declaration (JDA) anzunehmen, kann man ihm glauben. Aber seine Argumentation gegen die JDA ist so nicht haltbar. Vier Punkte. 1/ x.com/ZentralratJu...

„Dass die IHRA-Definition von Regierungen angenommen wurde, ist weitgehend Ergebnis politischer Kampagnen von Akteuren im Einklang mit der israelischen Regierung. Es gibt ausreichend Belege, dass die IHRA v. illiberalen Kräften instrumentalisiert wird, um Freiheiten & Menschenrechte zu untergraben.“