Exercise of inner freedom
Talk and reading with András Visky (Romania)
Moderator: Christoph Hantel
Translator: Esther Siegmund Heinke
It reads: Stephan Clemens (Ulm Theatre)
Book table: Jastram
Free admission
With the kind support of the Liszt Institute - Hungarian Cultural Centre Stuttgart and the Péter Horváth Foundation
Parts of the banks of the Danube in Eastern European countries remained the scene of ideological conflicts immediately after the Second World War. In the 1950s, tens of thousands of people in Romania were deported to labour camps run by the new regime.
In his novel „Resettlement“, playwright and poet András Visky tells the story of a kind of „Golgotha“ experienced by a devout family. Having first emigrated from Hungary to Romania, they are later forced by the Romanian authorities to spend years moving from one labour camp to the next. The mother and her seven children live in an atmosphere of violence, on the edge of existence - in an earth pit near the Danube Delta in the Bărăgan steppe - and despite the unbearable circumstances, they practise solidarityWhile the father, a pastor, serves a 22-year political prison sentence... Despite everything, love rises above revenge and contempt.
This world view is also formally supported in the novel - as with all the great masters of storytelling. The 822 short chapters all begin with a lower-case letter and end without a full stop. This indicates, among other things, that „freedom cannot be taken for granted. It must be constantly redefined because humanity is always inventing new forms of captivity“ (A. Visky).
In the masterly translation by Timea Tanko from Hungarian, the novel is on several best lists of various juries in German-speaking countries.
About the author:
https://www.suhrkamp.de/person/andras-visky-p-18192
András Visky, born in 1957, is a renowned Hungarian playwright and director who lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. After decades of writing theatre plays, poems and essays, he published his first and only novel „The Resettlement“ in 2022. This book caused quite a stir in Hungary and is now in its fifth edition there.
