Thea Dorn for Eva Menasse
The writers’ association PEN Berlin held its third General Assembly in person at Hamburg University Library on Friday. The journalist Deniz Yücel was re-elected as spokesperson. The writer (“Trost”) and ZDF presenter (“Das literarische Quartett”) Thea Dorn was elected as new spokesperson. She replaces writer Eva Menasse, who has held the position since the association’s founding in June 2022, but did not stand for re-election. Yücel and Dorn were elected by a large majority.
The writers Dana Grigorcea (Zurich), Sophie Sumburane (Potsdam) and Joachim Helfer (Berlin), the playwright Konstantin Küspert (Nuremberg) and the translator Sandra Hetzl (Berlin) were re-elected to the association’s board. New to the eleven-member board are the writer Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus, the publisher Birgit Schmitz (both from Berlin), the poet Paul-Henri Campbell (Vienna) and the writer and lawyer Andrea Landfried (Heidelberg).
“PEN Berlin may have been born quickly. The work of the past two and a half years has impressively demonstrated that it was not born out of defiance, but out of a sincere wish to establish a contemporary, productive and combative writers’ association. I have enormous respect for the task that lies ahead of me, but I am also excited about it”, said the new spokesperson, Thea Dorn, who has been a member of PEN Berlin since its founding.
And Deniz Yücel added: “I would like to thank Eva Menasse and all my colleagues on the board for their work in building up the organisation over the past few years. As an association that is suspicious of any kind of clubby behaviour, PEN Berlin has delivered since its inception – as a human rights organisation that supports persecuted authors, but also as an association for freedom of expression and diversity of opinion. This work must now be placed on a solid ground.”
“PEN Berlin has managed to become a relevant player in the cultural landscape in record time”, said outgoing spokeswoman Eva Menasse in her report on the association’s activities.
The General Assembly welcomed 99 new members from a variety of journalistic backgrounds, including the writers Martina Hefter, Frank Schätzing, Caroline Wahl and Hannes Bajohr, the sociologists Steffen Mau and Heinz Bude, the journalists Shila Behjat, John Goetz and Juan Moreno, and the TV and radio presenters Jo Schück and Jörg Thadeusz, the poets Christoph Danne, Romina Nikolić and Kinga Tóth, the playwright Theresia Walser, the satirist Ella Carina Werner, the musician Sebastian Krumbiegel, the Rushdie translator Bernhard Robben, the pioneer of poetry slam in Germany Wolf Hogekamp, the lawyer and founder of the “Verfassungsblog” Maximilian Steinbeis and the actor Ulrich Matthes.
PEN Berlin now has around 730 members, making it the largest writers’ association in the German-speaking world. The proportion of women is now 49.9% (at the time of its founding: 40.4%), and the average age is 53.6 (at the time of its founding: 53.1).
A resolution on “journalists killed in Gaza and Lebanon”, requested by around twenty members, was postponed after a lengthy debate. Dorn and Yücel pledged to hold an extraordinary General Assembly on the issue “as soon as possible”.
This Saturday, PEN Berlin is holding its traditional (and public) cultural congress under the motto “On we go”.
This year’s keynote speaker is the Israeli writer Etgar Keret. Other guests include the renowned Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, the equally renowned Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole, the Ugandan writer Stella Nyanzi, who lives in exile in Germany, and the author Philipp Ruch (Centre for Political Beauty). Other topics include: cultural policy under pressure in East Germany, self-censorship in writing and, as a public debate, the question of whether bans are an effective means of combating right-wing extremism.
Eva Menasse will give the opening speech and the journalist Bascha Mika will moderate the whole congress. Fabrik Altona, Hamburg, from 14h.
PEN Berlin. We stand by our word.