From Expat to Wahlberliner: Berlin as a Place of Work for English-Language Writers

This series of readings in English, presented by the Literary Salon Britta Gansebohm, constitutes a bridge between the English-language and German literary scene in Berlin. The concept of a reading in a setting reminiscent of a spacious and comfortable living room where all are welcome, with the ensuing discussion also including the audience, was an absolutely new idea in May 1995 when Der Literarische Salon was established. This openness is being expanded through the series “From Expat to Wahlberliner.” The target audience of this series comprises Berliners who hail from a wide variety of countries but speak English and little or no German. The series seeks to make a contribution to international understanding and successful coexistence in Berlin by having resident authors present their colleagues to the public. In one instance the pairing is a reciprocal one: The L.A. writer and Berliner-by-choice Kevin McAleer will be moderating the reading of novelist/playwright Carey Harrison, and on another evening Kevin’s presentation of his mock-epic poem on the life of movie star Errol Flynn will be moderated by Mr. Harrison, whose parents were the actors Lilli Palmer and Rex Harrison and through whom Mr. Harrison, this scion of Hollywood’s Golden Age, once encountered the subject of Kevin’s book-length poem. It is through Lilli Palmer that Carey Harrison also has a special relationship to Berlin, his mother having spent her youth in the city before fleeing from the Nazis to Paris and eventually London. The discussions which follow the readings will treat of such questions as: What impact does life in the German capital have on an author’s writing? Does life in Berlin help to idealize or deflate an author’s view of their homeland? How do expats experience this city along with its inhabitants and Germany in general? What makes Berlin such a special place for writers? How has the city changed for the expats since their arrival? What is their relationship to the German language? Can language also be a kind of homeland? How do Berliners-by-choice define the very word “homeland”?

Friday, 7 April 2017 at 8:30 pm
Carey Harrison will be reading from his latest novel "How to Push Through" (Dr. Cicero Books, published in September 2016)
Reading & Discussion
Moderation: Kevin McAleer

How to Push Through
This is the final book in a novel quartet called The Heart Beneath, which Carey Harrison worked on for 48 years. He published other novels during that span, but this tetralogy is really his life’s work. It begins with the rescue of a “wild child,” a Waldmensch or Wolfskind, from the forests of Soviet-occupied East Germany in 1947, where the boy, Egon, has lived alone for more than three years. His father was executed following the 1944 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler and his mother was sent away to her death in the final throes of the war – though not before hiding her son in the woods. Egon is now seven years old and no longer speaks. The tetralogy follows his rehabilitation into society and his return to the wilderness as a teenager in Britain so as to try and recapture his missing childhood. England and Germany are the twin poles of the tale, and the final book of the tetralogy, How to Push Through, is narrated by four women. They include a girl with whom Egon falls in love, and the elderly German psychoanalyst who brings them together. The girl has grown up in a family full of secrets, and her violent teenage years, in reaction to these secrets, lead her to the psychoanalyst and to Egon. The novel quartet is a love story of two people divorced not only from society but separated by national, social and psychological issues.

Carey Harrison is an English novelist and dramatist. He was born in 1944 in London to actors Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer and raised in Los Angeles and New York where he attended the Lycée Français. He is the author of forty stage plays and sixteen novels. Harrison’s most recent novels Justice and Who Was That Lady? have been acclaimed by readers and both reached No.1 on the Amazon Contemporary Fiction downloads list. His latest novel How to Push Through was published in 2016. Harrison has received numerous grants from the UK Arts Council and his prizes include the Sony Radio Academy Award, the Giles Cooper Award, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Best Play, and the Best Play award from the Berlin Akademie der Künste as well as two nominations (2005 and 2007) for the Pushcart Prize for Journalism. His work has been translated into thirteen languages. He himself has published translations from French, Italian, German and Spanish authors, and there have been performances of his translations from the works of Pirandello, Goldoni, Feydeau and Gert Hofmann; most recently he published “20 Poems” from the Arabic of Firas Sulaiman, in Banipal, the UK magazine of contemporary Arabic writing. Harrison’s essays have appeared in magazines as diverse as New Politics, a journal of socialist thought, and Chronicles, a paleoconservative magazine of American culture; he has also been a book reviewer for numerous newspapers and journals. A new opera based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, set to music by Nolan Gasser and with a libretto by Harrison, was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera House and premiered in March 2013, playing to sold-out audiences; three further opera companies are currently planning productions of the opera. Harrison lives in upstate New York with his wife, the artist Claire Lambe, and is Professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is presently in the German capital as a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Kevin McAleer was born in Santa Monica, California in 1961. He received his doctorate in history from the University of California and now lives in Berlin where he works as a writer and translator. His short stories have been published both in American magazines as well as in the German satire magazine Titanic, in taz and in TIP magazine. He is co-author of the story collection Zwei Amerikaner im deutschen Exil (1998; 2016), author of the award-winning play Bombay by the Spree (2010), the novels Surferboy (2007; 2015) and Berlin Tango (2016) and the historical monograph Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (1994; 2014) which was honored by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as one of their “Books of the Year.” He has recently brought to completion his decade-long project “Errol Flynn: A Life in Verse,” which is a book-length, mock-epic poem on the swashbuckling Hollywood actor.

This series is sponsored by the Senate of Berlin (Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa).
Conceptual assistance and the series title from Julia Eve Föll.

PLACE: The Literary Salon in the Z-Bar, Bergstraße 2, 10115 Berlin-Mitte
Admission: 7 euros/ reduced rate 5 euros (for holders of Berlin identity cards & students)
Reservations can be made at britta.gansebohm@salonkultur.de or by telephone at 0175 52 70 777.
Further information available at www.salonkultur.de und Facebook: Der Literarische Salon – das Original