03.07.2024: Family Secrets: Reading and Discussion with Elisabeth Bronfen

(From: Familiengeheimnisse - Lesung und Gespräch mit Elisabeth Bronfen, Lyrik Kabinett; free translation)

Families are the incarnation of stories about them. But nothing connects families as much as their secrets and hidings: Secrets passed on into the present by past generations. This is the topic of Elisabeth Bronfen's Merchant of Secrets (2003), an autofictionally primed novel that embarks on the quest of finding the untold as far as the postwar period: A Jew from Brooklyn starts a german-american family. Five decades after the end of the war, he finds himself on his deathbed in New York, sudden and with no explanation, leaving his daughter to wonder if it had truly merely been the snow that brought her father to Bavaria all these years ago. Struck by worry, she browses the family album and ends up entwined in a network of stories and rumours, all of which tie into Shakespearean dramas: How can these knots be untied?

Elisabeth Bronfen is a native of Munich and works as a scientist of Cultural Studies in Zurich and New York, where she conducts research and composes writing to various topics of literature, film, television, photography, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. After numerous scientific works which have all become standard works in her subject, such as Over her Dead Body (1994), The Knotted Subject (1998), Tiefer als der Tag Gedacht (2008), and Hollywoods Kriege (2013), she has now published her debut novel.

Moderation: Sarah Pritz (Cultural Sociologist at the FAU Erlangen-Nürnber), Franziska Stolz (English Literary Scholar at the LMU Munich)

Place & Time
Wednesday, July 3, 2024, 6.15pm.

Lyrik-Kabinett
Amalienstr. 83a / Rückgebäude
80799 München
(Underground Station Universität, line U3/U6)