Logo Goethe-Institut

USA Houston

|

3:45 PM

Transatlantic Feedback: Thomas Meinecke Reads from "Odenwald"

Reading and Discussion|A German-language reading from Meinecke's 2024 novel "Odenwald"

Thomas Meinecke Transatlantic Feedback square © Goethe Institut Houston

Thomas Meinecke Transatlantic Feedback © Goethe Institut Houston

Thomas Meinecke will read from his 2024 novel Odenwald  in German. This event is organized in partnership with Dr. Hans Boas and Dr. Thorsten Ries of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

About the Book

In Amorbach, deep in the Odenwald, in front of the Hotel zur Post where Theodor W. Adorno used to spend his summer holidays, the novelist Thomas Meinecke appears together with his fictional characters for research purposes. It soon becomes clear that Amorbach is also Adornobach, the dream place of the exiled philosopher, a place he himself often dreamed of from the Pacific coast. The Odenwald does not remain without influence on the investigations of the novel’s characters: it is a forest of odes and fairy tales, a dark German woodland inhabited not only by fairy-tale figures but also by forest peasants turned robbers after being dispossessed by the ruling prince. Some of them were transported to Texas as early as the nineteenth century, so that the Wild West, too, inscribes its motifs into Thomas Meinecke’s new novel.

In the Odenwald, the writer-performer Meinecke and his protagonists weave the guiding threads of an expansive investigation into a dense philosophical discourse braid. And over everything lies the concert music of the twentieth century—a debt this novel owes to Adorno. (Translated from Suhrkamp Verlag)

This event is part of “Transatlantic Feedback,” a month-long musical and literary journey by Thomas Meinecke through the U.S., organized together with Goethe-Institut USA.
 

About the Speaker

Thomas Meinecke

Thomas Meinecke was born in Hamburg in 1955 and now lives near Munich and in Marseille. He has authored numerous novels and short stories published by Suhrkamp Verlag since 1986, most recently “Odenwald,” 2024. He is also a musician, with his band F.S.K. (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle) founded in 1980, whose albums have been released on Daniel Richter’s Buback Label since 2008 (most recently “Topsy Turvy,” 2023). Meinecke has also collaborated on many electronic projects with Move D since 1998, worked as a radio DJ hosting his own show on Bayerischer Rundfunk from 1985 to 2021), and DJed at urban nightclubs (Berghain, Robert Johnson, Pudel Club, Rote Sonne, etc.). At Berlin’s Theater Hebbel am Ufer, he ran the dialogic event series “Plattenspieler” from 2007 until the first lockdown in 2020; since fall 2022, the series has continued at Berlin’s Volksbühne. In the winter semester of 2011/12, he held the poetry lectureship at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (“Ich als Text,” edition suhrkamp, 2012). He has held residencies at universities in Europe and the U.S., most recently: Writer in Residence at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and poetry lectureship on gender at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He has been awarded numerous awards, including the 2020 Berlin Literature Prize (with a visiting professorship at the Free University of Berlin in the summer semester of 2022). A “Text + Kritik” volume on Thomas Meinecke was published in 2021, and the poetological reader “Oceanic Writing” (Verbrecher Verlag) in 2022.