Capture, Treason and Solidarity

In today’s discourse, we’re all held captive: by an escalating politics of war and cruelty, by mutually exclusive conceptions of trauma and atonement—and by our own positions, as the only way forward, it seems, is to double down.

The hardest thing, then, is to build alliances that defy the bad determinism of the day: to remain receptive to the grievances of all, but capable of judgment at the same time. Because not all sufferings are equal or could be treated equally—as ongoing wars and their repercussions in the streets of Berlin demonstrate, there is never no hierarchy of solidarity, neither in the positions of the German state, nor in activist politics.

Tash Aw, Moshtari Hilal and Diedrich Diederichsen—a novelist, a writer and visual artist, a philosopher and critic—will shed a provocative light on some of the following questions: What agency are we left with when historical injustices happen in plain sight? Do words and acts of solidarity still have a purchase on reality, or are they a treason to their very principles?

Read Tash’s novels, essays and in particular his memoir Strangers on a Pier that masterfully thread the historical and the personal with a particular regard to the legacy of the British imperial rule in South East Asia and its eerie echos in today’s world literary system; buy and read Moshtari’s Hierarchies of Solidarity, co-written with Sinthujan Varatharajah and out at Wirklichkeit Books; and meditate over Diedrich Diedrichsen’s anthology «Das 21. Jahrhundert», out with KiWi, that concentrates two and a half decades of writing on the arts, culture and politics, as well as his essay «Don’t Cry Woke» from our Reader 2.

An evening co-hosted with daadgalerie and Mathias Zeiske.

This is the last installment of our talk series «Berlin Review Audio» that was supported by the Berlin senate for culture in 2023/24 — we’ll be back with a new set-up next year.

Lesungen und Gespräche auf Englisch und Deutsch. Freier Eintritt, begrenztes Sitzplatzkontingent.