Click here to watch the video from Tuesday!

Join us for a virtual GSA Arts Night to kick off this year’s conference with two special guests:

Max Czollek & Sasha Marianna Salzmann

In-yer-face-Germany: From Postmigrant Theater to De-Integration

Reading and Conversation with Johanna Schuster-Craig and Olivia Landry

Tuesday, September 28^th, 2pm EDT / 20Uhr MESZ

Veranstaltung in deutscher Sprache, Diskussion deutsch und englisch. 

We gratefully acknowledge support from the DAAD and 1014.

The event will be hosted virtually via this website.

In theater congresses such as the “Radikale jüdische Kulturtage,” in essays such as Desintegriert Euch!, in debates, performances, workshops, lyric poetry, plays and novels, Max Czollek and Sasha Marianna Salzmann have been exploring the continually reconfigured “We” that today characterizes and polarizes German society. They ask how this “we” has been defined in relation to different “others”– after the end of World War II, after the labor recruitment treaty with Turkey in 1961, after reunification in 1990, and after the migrations of post-Soviet Jews to Europe? And how have new voices – Czollek and Salzmann among them – turned to art as a means to rethink German society in new and different ways? Join us for an Arts Night event devoted to a new literature and a new theater that represent a changing society.

Max Czollek lives in Berlin. He studied political science at the Free University of Berlin and did his doctorate at the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin. He is member of the poetry collective G13 and co-editor of the magazine “Jalta - Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart”. His poetry volumes are published by Verlagshaus Berlin, essays (Desintegriert Euch! 2019; Gegenwartsbewältigung 2020) by Carl Hanser Verlag; a third volume is in the works. Since June 2021 Czollek is academic-artistic director of the initiative “Coalition for Pluralistic Public Discourse” (CPPD) founded in June 2021.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann was born in Volgograd and lived in Moscow until 1995, then here and there in the Federal Republic of Germany. Then in Istanbul. Currently lives in Berlin. From 2002 to 2013, Salzmann co-edited the cultural journal freitext, and from 2013 to 2015 they were artistic director of STUDIO Я at the Max Gorki Theater, where they were also author in residence. Salzmann is represented by the Verlag der Autoren, which has published collections of their plays, as well as by Suhrkamp Verlag. Salzmann’s debut novel Außer sich was shortlisted for the German Book Prize; a second novel, Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein, comes out this Fall.

Together, Czollek and Salzmann initiated “Disintegration. A Congress of Contemporary Jewish Positions” (2016), the “Radical Jewish Culture Days” (2017) at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Studio Я as well as “Days of Jewish-Muslim Guiding Culture” (2020) at theatres throughout the German-speaking world.