The world is not a disk, it is hollow inside. And it is in the inner curve of the sphere that we humans live. Peter Bender, the main character of "Monde vor der Landung", the current novel by Clemens Setz, is convinced of this. Bender, the supporter of the hollow world theory, really existed, he died in 1944 in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Florian Balke
Culture editor at the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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Other worlds, slight shifts and craziness, familiar things that are given an unknown twist so that one can think productively about one as well as the other, about facts, reality and realities – this is the area in which Clemens Setz feels comfortable as a writer. Frankfurt's new poetics lecturer has repeatedly combined the sharp intellectual penetration of contemporary reality and its playful distortion.
From 30 May onwards, the author, who was born in Graz in 1982, will give the Frankfurt Poetics Lecture in the lecture hall centre on the Westend campus of Goethe University. It is the oldest in Germany, established in 1959 on the Oxford model, and is still widely regarded in the German-language literary scene, although there are now numerous such lecture series, two in the Rhine-Main area alone, in Wiesbaden and Mainz.
Turbulent years
Over the past more than 60 years, the Frankfurt lecture has often shed its skin. At first it was mainly supported by the Fischer publishing house, then for a long time by Suhrkamp, in between there was a break of more than ten years, later a consortium of Frankfurt publishers and cultural institutions selected the lecturers who found it increasingly difficult to appear unmistakable and compelling semester after semester in the general poetics babble at various German universities.
So it happened that Goethe University came to the conclusion that, for compliance reasons, no one should really get involved except her. Since then, the Foundation's Guest Lectureship in Poetics has been mainly supported by the Association of Friends and Sponsors of the University and only takes place once a year.
The Corona pandemic further confused it. In March 2020, shortly before the first lockdown, Christoph Ransmayr gave a single lecture, for the winter semester 2020/21 Monika Rinck recorded a digital lecture in three videos, in 2021 it was cancelled altogether, and in 2022 everything finally got back on track with Judith Hermann.
So now it's Clemens Setz. It is not often the case that an author who has already been awarded the Büchner Prize gives the Poetics lecture. In the summer of 2012, Alexander Kluge was the last author at the lectern of Goethe University to receive Germany's most prestigious literary prize at the Staatstheater Darmstadt – in 2003, nine years earlier. The Büchner Prize awarded by Durs Grünbein, lecturer in the winter semester 2009/10, even dates back to 1995.
Secrets in art and worldview
The opposite way is not self-evident, but it happens more frequently. Terézia Mora, poetry lecturer in the winter semester 2013/14, received the Büchner Prize 2018, Marcel Beyer stepped up to the Frankfurt lectern in January 2016 and received the award in the autumn of the same year, Sibylle Lewitscharoff spoke in 2011 and was honoured in Darmstadt in 2013.
Now Setz succeeds Kluge and Grünbein and talks about "mysteries". So far, he has left it mysterious, so we can look forward to it. Less mysterious is his career as an author. He made his debut in 2007 with the novel "Söhne und Planeten" ("Sons and Planets"), and his second novel "Die Frequenzen" was nominated for the German Book Prize in 2009. In addition to other novels such as "Indigo" and "The Hour Between Woman and Guitar", short story collections such as "Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes", the poetry collection "Die Vogelstraußtrompete" and plays such as "Flüstern in stehennzugn" and "Der Triumph der Waldrebe in Europa" (The Triumph of Clematis in Europe) followed. Most recently, "Monde vor der Landung" was published in February, in which Setz erects a monument to the ideas and person of Peter Bender, his ideas, his imagination, his errors, his humanity, his brave suffering during the Nazi era.
"Nothing is human out there, only we are here"
A few weeks ago in Frankfurt, the author saw the reason for Bender's firm belief in all sorts of spun and crazy things in a feeling of fear of an increasingly complex scientific view of the world, which continues to grow cheerfully to this day. "Nothing is human out there, only we are here," he summed up this feeling at the Literaturhaus at the end of April. Outside, according to the feeling of many, there are only "big burning gas balls". And below, one may add in conspiracy theory-loving times, only encapsulated little bubbles of panic.
Setz now gets to the bottom of all this and much more in his lecture. It will be accompanied by a workshop on June 6 and 7 in the Eisenhower Hall of the IG Farben House, registration is requested at poetik@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de. On June 14 at 19:30 p.m., the final reading will begin at the Literaturhaus, and on May 31 at 19 p.m., the student exhibition "Reality Checkpoint – Clemens Setz Read" will open, which can be seen in the Schopenhauer Studio of the University Library until June 28.
In the spring of 2024, Aris Fioretos will succeed Setz. First of all, however, it is about secrets in art and worldview. About secret knowledge, esoteric, mysterious. To reveal, conceal, discover.
Clemens Setz, Frankfurt Poetics Lecture, May 30 and June 6 and 13, 18:15 p.m., Hall HZ1, Lecture Hall Center, Westend Campus of Goethe University.