Uncertain States Wir sind alle im Exil

“The new millennium is under the sign of exile, all kinds of exile, whether in your own country or the wide world, your own apartment or language or outside them. A convulsion constantly spreading: ‘a spectre is haunting the world’.”

Hardly any other author’s works have explored the issues of exile, foreignness, and the loss of one’s own language as much as those of Norman Manea. His own biography is also characterised by exile. He experienced his “first exile” when he was just five years old and his family were deported from Bukovina in Romania to a concentration camp in Transnistria. Later, in 1986, he left Ceausescu’s Romania, emigrating to the United States via West Berlin.

Volker Koepp made the film This Year in Czernowitz (German title: Dieses Jahr in Czernowitz) with Jewish émigrés and their children, including Harvey Keitel and Norman Manea; excerpts and new materials will be shown in the Akademie.

Michael Krüger joins Norman Manea and Volker Koepp to discuss the film as well as Manea’s collection of essays Wir sind alle im Exil.