Berlin Review Audio: Unholy Texts

25.06.2024 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Logan February

and Birthe Mühlhoff, Miriam Stoney, Tobias Haberkorn

«I have arrived in Berlin with a territorial trauma; the history that haunts me at Sanssouci and the Berliner Schloss is divinely wicked. Still—slices of sweet rebellion enter the uncertainty of this new life. Such as standing in the lectern at the Berliner Dom, giving my sermons on pride and lust to full Sunday congregations.» Logan February

Words are said to have been in the beginning, but more often than not, they fail us. Be it in pain, desire or lust, in faith, doubt or compulsive action, words are often secondary to non-verbal forms of meaning. And yet as social beings, bound to history and to the presence of others, we return to language and invest our deepest emotions in it. We read and pray, we write and lecture, we create and use text in order to compensate for the insufficiency of the word.

For this new edition of Berlin Review Audio, we’re talking to two writers who explore the limits of language and the limits of text, each in their own way. The critic and translator Birthe Mühlhoff has been a contributor to Berlin Review since the magazine’s first issue in February 2024. In conversation with editor Tobias Haberkorn, Birthe presents her research on Simone Weil, the French philosopher, mystic and political activist who died in 1943 at only 34 years of age in a sanatorium southeast of London. Although her topics seem austere and out-of-date, Weil has attracted a remarkably young readership in recent years. While she was born to a Jewish family, many of her writings engage with her conflicted affection for the Catholic church. The severity of her self-examination and the intransigence of her political ideals fascinate a surprisingly wide group of readers. For Birthe, reading Simone Weil today is inseparable from questioning herself: Why do I read what I read, and why do I read it now?

In an essay for Berlin Review’s upcoming print edition, Nigerian-born poet and essayist Logan February, who is currently a fellow at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, visits different sites of refuge and displacement in and around Berlin. At Frederick the Great’s palace of Sanssouci, in the Humboldt Forum’s colonial collections, or the Berliner Dom where Logan was invited to sermon on the cardinal sins of pride and luxuria/lust, the poet takes the word «verschollen» as a descriptor meaning both lost or forgotten, though which also contains the potential of «resounding» in the resulting emptiness. Such embedded strains of meaning interest Berlin Review’s contributing editor Miriam Stoney, who will be in conversation with Logan. Following her forthcoming essay The Good Enough Translator in Berlin Review, Miriam is interested in the unspeakable, the unspeaking and the unspoken within literature and its associated labour forms.

Birthe Mühlhoff is a literary critic and translator. Her writing has appeared in Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Point and elsewhere. She’s a columnist for Cargo. For Berlin Review’s first and second issues, she wrote on the works of historian Peter Brown and on novels about motherhood. Birthe lives in Dresden.

Logan February, born in Anambra, Nigeria, is a poet, essayist, songwriter and music critic. Their poetry collection In the Nude was released in 2019. They are a recipient of the 2023/24 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellowship and of the Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature. Their essay Sans, Souci. will be published in Berlin Review’s upcoming print edition.

Miriam Stoney is a visual artist, author and translator engaging with language in various media. Her performance I’m just saying with Robert Schwarz was recently on show at Kunstverein Hamburg. She is a contributing editor to Berlin Review.

Tobias Haberkorn is the publisher and a founding editor of Berlin Review.