"Schleifen"

Reading and moderated conversation
in cooperation with Literaturhaus Hamburg

"Elias who?" Not long ago, even seasoned literary insiders would have drawn a blank. But now he's arrived - Elias Hirschl! "Oh, Hirschl, of course!" everyone in the know says these days, or at least everyone who considers themselves in the know. Some even volunteer a first-name basis unprompted: "Sure, Elias is an enormous talent." There's no getting around this rising star of the German-language literary scene. The feuilletons have been falling over themselves for some time now when it comes to the thirty-two-year-old Vienna-born musician, slam poet, and author of literary, theatrical, and radio texts. Audiences love him too - he won the audience prize at the Bachmannpreis in 2022.

If you still look to literature for imagination, idiosyncrasy, and a genuine engagement with language, this is the place. Much like the multifaceted Viennese school, the focus here is never just on plot but on language itself - far from the rampant banality of mainstream prose. That said, the plot of "Schleifen" is very much its own thing:

As a child, Franziska suffers from a condition that is almost impossible to explain: every symptom she hears or reads about immediately manifests in her own body. One word is enough, and her body responds. With the help of a young mathematician, she discovers that words from dead languages can shield her from her affliction. From this experience grows a shared project: the search for a language that is unambiguous, that does not wound, that does not spiral out of control. "Schleifen" asks - with striking contemporary relevance - how much language shapes what we consider right.

With remarkable sophistication, "Schleifen" weaves historical material together with invention. In Hirschl's work, the seemingly impossible repeatedly turns out to be true, and the rest is brilliantly made up. The Vienna Circle, mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the political ruptures of the twentieth century form the backdrop.