Max Czollek (born 6 May 1987 in East Berlin) is a German writer, lyric-poet, stage performer and curator. He is a member of the "G13" authors' collective. [1] [2]
Max Czollek (born 6 May 1987 in East Berlin) is a German writer, lyric-poet, stage performer and curator. He is a member of the "G13" authors' collective. [1] [2]
Czollek was born in Berlin in 1987. His paternal grandfather was a German Jew who survived several concentration camps, lived in exile in China for several years, and then returned to East Germany in the late 1940s. His only surviving Jewish relative is his paternal aunt. [3] Max Czollek attended the Jewish Upper School Jüdisches Gymnasium Moses Mendelssohn (JGMM) in Berlin, passing his school finals ( Abitur ) in 2006. During his time at school he took a year abroad in Texas. [1] Between 2007 and 2012 he studied political sciences at Berlin. Then, from 2012 to 2016 he worked on his doctorate at the Center for Research on Antisemitism (TU Berlin) and at Birkbeck, University of London. He was supported with a stipend from the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Scholarship Fund. [4] Since 2016 he has been a member of the producers' collective "Jalta – Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart" ("Yalta - Positions on the Jewish Present"). [5]
Czollek has been part of the lyric-poetry collective G13 since 2009. In 2013 he initiated the international "Babelsprech" lyric-poetry project, in order to network a young German language "lyric scene". [6]
Since 2014 he has teamed up with the novelist Deniz Utlu to organize the literature series "Gegenwartsbewältigung" [note 1] at the Maxim Gorki Theater (Studio Я). Together with Sasha Marianna Salzmann he was co-instigator of the "Disintegration Congress" (2016) [7] on contemporary Jewish thinking and of the "Radical Jewish Arts Days" ("Radikale Jüdische Kulturtage" 2017). [8] During 2016/2017 he was co-leader with Esra Küçük of the Maxim Gorki Theater's "Young Berlin Council" project. [9]
Czollek self-identifies as Jewish. In 2021, Jewish writer Maxim Biller accused Czollek of appropriating a Jewish identity, as, according to traditional halakha, Czollek is not a Jew, having only one Jewish grandfather. [10] In his column in the newspaper Die Zeit , Biller compared Czollek to Benjamin Wilkomirski, a Swiss writer who had confabulated his alleged Jewish origins. [11] In reaction, the author Sasha Marianna Salzmann defended Czollek in the FAZ highlighting that questions of patrilinearity were have long been a part of an inner-jewish plurality [12] Likewise, the Journalist Ofer Waldman defended Czollek in Deutschlandfunk Kultur and called the attacks a religiously veiled political confrontation. [13] In an open letter of support 278 Jewish and non-Jewish writers and other individuals mostly from the cultural sector supported Czollek and dismissed the attacks as politically motivated aiming to deligitmize Czolleks political work [14]
Sibylle Berg is a German-Swiss contemporary author and playwright. They write novels, essays, short fiction, plays, radio plays, and columns. And they are as of 2024 a member of the European Parliament. Their 18 books have been translated into 30 languages. They have won numerous awards, including the Thüringer Literaturpreis, the Bertolt-Brecht-Literaturpreis, and the Johann-Peter-Hebel-Preis. They have become an iconic figure in German alternative sub-cultures, gaining a large fan base among the LGBT community and the European artistic communities. They live in Switzerland and Israel. Their 2019 work GRM. Brainfuck, a science fiction novel set in a dystopian near future won the Swiss Book Prize and was noticed by The Washington Post. It reached fourth place on the Spiegel Bestseller list, with the sequel, RCE, entering the list as highest entry of the week at place 14. On 1 March 2023 Berg was invited as special guest to open the high-profile Elevate Festival in Graz, Austria.
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Sasha Marianna Salzmann is a German playwright, essayist, theatre curator and novelist. They are a writer in residence at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin where they were artistic director of the studio theatre, Studio Я, from 2013 to 2015.
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Hugo Thielen is a German freelance author and editor, who is focused on the history of Hanover, the capital of Lower Saxony, in a lexicon of the city, another one especially of its art and culture, and a third of biographies. He co-authored a book about Jewish personalities in Hanover's history.
Ilma Rakusa is a Swiss writer and translator. She translates French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian into German.
Anja Kampmann is a German poet and author.
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