Martin Pollack in conversation with Mircea Cărtărescu and Barbi Marković
“It’s our fault that Europe looks like Rimbaud’s drunken ship today,” says Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu, who is invited to join the talk at Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz along with Belgrade-born, Vienna-based author Barbi Marković. The guests at Kasino are from the Balkans where Europe’s plight is perhaps more profound and democracies more fragile than anywhere else. Is the old Europe still strong enough to help these regions or is there rather a risk of Europe being “balkanised”? They will talk about developments in their countries and their visions of Europe.
Philipp Hauß and Marie-Luise Stockinger will read aloud texts by the authors.
Consecutive interpreting from Romanian: Ernest Wichner.
The discussion will be in German.
16 November, 8 p.m.
Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz
Schwarzenbergplatz 1, 1010 Vienna
Admission: EUR 15.00. 10% discount for Erste Bank card holders, upon presentation of the card at the Burgtheater ticket office or the evening box office of Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz.
The series of talks Grenzgänger/Grenzdenker (Cross-Border Travellers/Thinkers) is a collaborative project of Burgtheater Vienna with ERSTE Foundation.
Barbi Marković, born in Belgrade in 1980, studied German language and literature in Belgrade and Vienna, and has been living in Vienna since 2009. In 2009 she created quite a stir with Ausgehen (Going Out, 2006), her remix of a Thomas Bernhard novel. She was awarded the Alpha Literature Prize (2016) and the Adelbert von Chamisso Promotional Prize (2017) for her novel Superheldinnen (Superheroines, 2016), which was also adapted for the Volkstheater. She participated in the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize competition in 2017.
Mircea Cărtărescu, born in Bucharest in 1956, has been publishing poems and prose since 1978. His work has been translated into many languages and he has received numerous awards, for example for Nostalgia (1997/2009), Travesti (2010), the Orbitor (Blinding) trilogy The Left Wing (2007), The Body (2011) and The Right Wing (2014), and Beautiful Strangers (2016). Awards include the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (2015) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2015).
