3 – 9 June: Online cultural events
Literature for breakfast and live music for dinner!

Start your day with a literary breakfast, get a post-colonial perspective for lunch, beard poets in their lair over aperitifs and dine to a Bach violin sonata in the evening. A raft of online cultural events to enrich your mornings, noons and nights this week.

Wednesday 3 June, 6 pm
THEATRE | MAXIM GORKI THEATER: ATLAS OF COMMUNISM

ORDINARY PEOPLE and their experience of Communism, not in theory but in everyday life, are the focus of Atlas des Kommunismus (Atlas of Communism), a documentary play by Lola Arias. To cast her play, Arias looked for a mixed bag of people with diverse experiences of Communist East Germany. She found a translator, a punk rock singer, a puppeteer, a 16-year-old activist, and a die-hard fan of the German Democratic Republic, to name just a few. The cast, age 10 to 84, talk about their lives in the play and bring history to life. The play is available online for streaming for 24 hours.
Language: German with English subtitles
>>> Atlas of Communism 
 
 
Thursday 4 June, 8.30­–9 am 
DISCUSSION | LITERARY BREAKFAST

LITERATURE FOR EARLY RISERS can be livestreamed straight to your breakfast table on the Traduki network, despite the adverse conditions these days, every Thursday till 25 June! The literature in question hails from Southeast Europe, the region showcased at the Leipzig Book Fair from 2020–2022. Each episode of Common Ground. Literature from Southeast Europe features a different selected writer sharing personal experiences and impressions as well as good reads a-plenty. Lidija Dimkovska will be the special guest this Thursday. Her book of poems Schwarz auf Weiß (Black on White) was published in 2019 in a German translation from the Macedonian by Alexander Sitzmann. It’s about roots and uprooting, about war, separation and departures.
Language: German
>>> Literary Breakfast

 

Thursday 4 June – Saturday 6 June
FESTIVAL | LATITUDE FESTIVAL

(POST)COLONIAL (L)ATITUDES. The Goethe-Institut’s digital Latitude Festival zeroes in on the persistence of colonial structures in the postcolonial present and how they can be overcome. Various performing artists, journalists, researchers and legal experts, among others, will be exploring these important issues in discussions, video performances, online exhibitions and film screenings. The festival will be livestreamed.
Language: English, for the most part with German subtitles or simultaneous translation into German
>>> Latitude Festival
 
 
Thursday 4 June, 9–10 pm 
CONCERT | KONZERTHAUS BERLIN: BACH SONATAS & PARTITAS FOR SOLO VIOLIN

FIRST FIDDLE. This weekly series of streamed concerts from the Konzerthaus in Berlin features six Berlin violinists: concertmasters Suyoen Kim and Sayako Kusaka along with Viviane Hagner, Carolin Widmann, Veronika Eberle and Midori Seiler. For openers, Midori Seiler will be playing Bach’s Sonata No. 3 in C major to an empty echoing auditorium.
>>> Bach’s Sonatas & Partitas for Solo Violin 
   
Friday 5 June to Thursday 11 June, daily
FESTIVAL | 21st BERLIN POETRY FESTIVAL: PLANET P

TEN – NINE – EIGHT ... THREE – TWO – ONE – BLAST OFF! All systems are go for 150 artists to take off on Friday for Planet P, propelled by more than 30 events over the course of seven days. The 21st Berlin Poetry Festival – showcasing Australia as this year’s special guest country – will be a terrific mix of audio and video, discussions, performances with music and other artistic productions, to be savoured within the comfort of your own four walls. Poetic activism is also part of the lineup, with refugee writers presenting poetry from a post-colonial perspective and political activists articulating their discontent. You can get a foretaste of the upcoming festival before Friday at the “Poets’ Home (Corners)”, where you can virtually beard the poets in their lairs each evening at 6 pm.
Languages: German and English, plus a few contributions in other languages with German translation
>>> Berlin Planet P poetry festival programme 
 
 
Saturday 6 June, 4 pm
MUSIC | HÄNDEL DAY

WE CAN HANDLE THIS, said the folks over at Händel-Haus, so they came up with some virtual consolation for the cancelled Handel Festival: for their “Händel Day” programme, Valer Sabadus, Daniel Behle, Andreas Wolf, the Lautten Compagney Berlin, Bridges to Classics and other musicians will be going for baroque, live from the house in Halle (Saxony-Anhalt) in which George Frideric Händel was born.
Language: German
>>> Händel Day
 
 
Tuesday 9 June, 7 pm 
READING | THE GOLDEN YEARS OF FRANZ TAUSEND

SOUNDS LIKE THE TALL TALES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, but it’s Titus Müller. The German writer will be reading from his latest novel, Die goldenen Jahre des Franz Tausend (The Golden Years of Franz Tausend) on Tuesday in a live stream from the municipal library in Berlin-Mitte. The book is about a fraudulent alchemist in 1920s Germany who claimed he could turn base metals into gold. Industrialists saw this as a golden opportunity to finance German rearmament in secret. What at first glance smacks of tall tales is actually based on real people and events, and it’s the fruit of painstaking historical research.
Language: German
>>> “Die goldenen Jahre des Franz Tausend on YouTube”