Literture days in Lana

Memory forgets, wants to forget and is fussy. It shifts, overlays, overwrites and fades. It changes, distorts and deforms, it cheers and it breaks down, it snagged and ebbed, slips away and covers up. It jumps and collapses, it emerges and brings down, sometimes, we recently hear, even monuments. In the flickering act of consciousness called memory, doubt about one's own truth always lurks. What it tells is not only history, and how it tells it is part of what is told. The past, looking at memory, is never a whole either, as the classical understanding of memory as storage or archive has assumed. It is not a stable quantity to which we have unbroken access. Rather, the past is produced in breaks and fragments, which again have gaps and blind spots in them and contain unasked questions about memory. So what do we rely on when we ask what happened and when we tell it? At what point does experienced history begin when we tell of the past and say "then", "once", "as" and "later"? After all, it is about experience that we want to turn into meaning when we look into the past and bring it into the present. From what then arises remembered past? How does memory transform into narrative and literature? With the culture of memory, which the Literaturtage Lana has been following for years and beyond the cultural-critical lament that memory is dwindling, we assume that in every memory the experience of a now and a then flows into each other, that we carry moments from one into the other and do not fall back on past beings as if they were stored somewhere and are available to us as a preserved, passive object. When we bring it out, we do it with what is now available to us in terms of knowledge, perception and experience and we do it with the questions that move us now and allow us to look back into this or that past. PROGRAM Monday, 24 August 2020, Opening Raiffeisen House Lana, Andreas-Hofer-Strasse 9 20.00: Welcome: LR Philipp Achammer, BM Dr. Harald Stauder, President Prof. Elmar Locher Svetlana Alexievich*: The Last Witnesses (Hanser Berlin 2014) Video transmission with Ganna Maria Braungardt Introduction and reading: Martin Pollack *Due to the current travel regulations Svetlana Alexievich is now present via Skype. Tuesday, August 25, 2020 Schallerhof in the villa, Raffeingasse 2 18.00: Anne Weber: Ancestors. A time travel diary (Luchterhand 2015) Introduction and discussion: Sabine Mayr 19.30: Cécile Wajsbrot: Destruction (Wallstein Verlag 2020) Introduction and discussion: Anne Weber 20.30: Géraldine Schwarz: The amnesiacs. Memories of a European woman (Secession Verlag für Literatur, 2018) Introduction and discussion: Klaus Hartig Wednesday, 26 August 2020 18.00: Esther Kinsky: Slates (Suhrkamp 2020) Introduction: Christine Vescoli 19.00: Miron Białoszewski: Memories from the Warsaw Uprising (From Polish and with an epilogue by Esther Kinksy. Suhrkamp 2019) Introduction and reading: Esther Kinsky 20.00: Magdalena Tulli: Dreams and stones Translation and discussion: Esther Kinsky