Judith Schalansky assumes the Frankfurt Chair of Poetics in the 2025 summer semester. In conversation with UniReport, she discusses collecting as a mode of world appropriation, the loss of things and the consolation of culture, as well as bio- and bibliodiversity.
UniReport: Ms. Schalansky, are there particular places where you prefer to write? What do those places need to be like?
Judith Schalansky: It’s no secret that I write at the Berlin State Library, in the building on Potsdamer Straße designed by Hans Scharoun – which is rightly called a “reading landscape.” The space allows you to work in quiet concentration and yet still be among people. For me, writing requires not just peace and quiet but also access to books. The library is my natural habitat, maybe also because I consider my writing a form of research.
Many of your works combine scholarly research, poetic language, and precise design. What role does collecting – of materials, topics, images – play in this process? Is it a method, a stance, maybe even a mode of world appropriation? How does writing about the world alter one’s perception of it?
I’m always fascinated by how a subject changes as one dives deeper into it, and how that in turn impacts the very questions one began with. It’s like the Mandelbrot fractals – the deeper you zoom in, the more intricate and complex the patterns become. It’s endless. Collecting is often the starting point, the prerequisite for making the world one’s own – and evidently an anthropological constant: you find something and drag it into your den. Only later do you realize what of it is actually useful – to be quoted, excerpted, paraphrased, or referenced. The art, of course, lies in eventually forgetting all that you’ve read in order to find a tone, a stance, an entry point – and then write your own text. It’s a great metamorphic cycle in which secondary literature becomes primary again.
Your book “Verzeichnis einiger Verluste” [published in German in 2018, with the English translation, “An Inventory of Losses”, following in 2020] can be read as a text that begins where something once was – dealing with the traces, signs, and evidence of loss in the world. Through the act of remembering what has been lost, you manage to create a kind of presence of the absent. In your work, what is the relationship between materiality and loss? Do you see disappearance more as a threat or an aesthetic opportunity?
It’s both – and they are interlinked. Impending or suffered loss creates the urgency to engage with a matter, whether it’s the death of a loved one or the fact that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting. Personally, I believe that the experience of loss is foundational to human culture – painful experiences that need to be tamed, invoked, and artistically processed. At some point, our ancestors began to no longer leave their dead exposed to the elements and wild animals, but to bury them, thereby removing them from the food chain. Things become invested with meaning – magical thinking begins. Every successful funeral contains that transcendent moment when the deceased is both present and absent, and poetry and music often play a crucial role in this. Consolation cannot exist without culture.
You grew up in the GDR and were only 9 years old at the time of Germany’s reunification. What do you remember? Does the disappearance of GDR everyday life, and the memory of it, influence your literary work?
I remember a great deal, and I’ve written about it repeatedly. It is – and remains – the country of my childhood. Perhaps even more formative than life under a different system were the moments of upheaval and transformation that followed – they may have attuned me to utopian thinking. “It could all be different” – that is both a terrifying and a deeply alluring thought.
You’ve twice won first prize from the German Book Art Foundation for “Most Beautiful Book of the Year” (“Atlas of Remote Islands”, 2009, and “The Giraffe’s Neck”, 2012). What is your view of the relationship between book design and text? Can the text be separated from its book form at all?
Not for me. I started out as a designer, and I remain one even as an author. I think in books – and I find it strange when others act as if there were something like a “pure text”.
Since 2013, you have edited the „Naturkunden“ series at Matthes & Seitz Berlin, known for its bibliophilic design and wide-ranging topics – from wasps to oysters to fir trees. What draws you to this combination of natural observation, literary form, and design? How do you select the topics and authors for the series?
The idea was to connect two realms that both involve beauty and diversity: nature and book culture. After all, beauty is our strongest argument when it comes to preserving and promoting bio- and bibliodiversity. Both involve sensory experience. In the beginning, we approached specific authors whom we suspected might connect with a certain animal, for example. They don’t have to be experts. Anyone who is passionate about an animal or plant, and wants to explore that fascination through writing, is qualified enough.
Have any of the (Frankfurt) poetics lectures from past years or decades particularly resonated with you – whether in terms of aesthetics, themes, irritation, or inspiration?
You won’t catch me revealing that. Perhaps it shows, perhaps not.
Your lecture title already sparks curiosity – could you share more about the themes you’ll be addressing? Will the “materials” (marble, mercury, mist) in your lecture’s title function as metaphors for different states of writing – or might they also be understood as modes of reading?
I want to trace the conditions not just of my writing but of our lives on this planet – the vast relationship we have to the world, and the role that art, poetry, and literature play in this immense and often violent endeavor. That includes the material nature of things. Marble, mercury, and mist are metaphorically charged, of course. However, aside from that, their physicality tells us something vital about the state of the world. Poetics lectures are a hellish genre – a deep dive into the guts of it all – and to have the chance to contribute to the “primordial mother” of all such formats is a welcome sweat-inducing alternative to classic exam nightmares. As you can tell: I’m absolutely thrilled!
Questions: Anna Yeliz Schentke and Dirk Frank
Under the title “Marble, Mercury, Mist: What the World Is Made Of”, Judith Schalansky will deliver the renowned Frankfurt Poetics Lectures on three Tuesday evenings – July 1, 8, and 15, 2025, each starting at 6 p.m. A public reading will take place at the Frankfurt Literaturhaus on July 2, 2025. The lectures will be delivered in German. The lecture series will be accompanied by the exhibition “Wechselstoffe” (July 1–16) by Michael Kolod, Jan Schmidt, and Vroni Schwegler in the space Dante 9, as well as the academic workshop “Naturkunden between Literature and Science” (July 15), organized by Prof. Roland Borgards.
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