The Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB), founded by Walter Höllerer in 1963, is an event forum and guest house, workplace and talent factory for authors and tanslators. The LCB enjoys the reputation of an institution of international significance through it’s promotional programs, project initiatives and the magazine "Language in the technical age". Public readings, workshops for authors and translators, and guests from all over the world make the house at the Wannsee a place of vivid literary activity and exchange. Since 1989, exchange with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe constitute a focus of the LCB’s program. Long-term cooperation (et al. Deutschlandfunk (German radio), Goethe Institute, Leipzig Book Fair, Robert Bosch Foundation) guarantee the continuous literary procurement beyond language borders.
When the writer, literary scholar and "Akzente" editor Walter Höllerer founded the LCB in 1963, he conceived it as a central point on the German literary map. Today, the house in Berlin-Wannsee is not only an important address for authors and readers and a meeting place for international guests, but "a nerve centre of all of German-language literature", as the Zurich literature professor Peter von Matt once wrote.
It all started with a series of events that Höllerer initiated at Berlin’s Technical University in the winter semester of 1959/60. Günter Eich and Ilse Aichinger, Max Frisch and Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Uwe Johnson were among the first guests. In October 1962, Höllerer dragged the annual meeting of the "Gruppe 47" out to the Wannsee villa on Am Sandwerder 5, "a labyrinth of junkrooms", but a house with atmosphere and character.
Ever since then, world literature has been a guest on the banks of the Wannsee. The upper floors of the LCB house rooms for authors, translators and other guests; shortterm visitors and grant holders stay here. For hundreds of international authors, the LCB has become a symbol of cosmopolitan Berlin.
The house owes its reputation to countless writers’ meetings, conferences and colloquia; this is where the backgrounds of writing and reading, production and criticism are on the agenda. The LCB’s bylaws state its purpose as "promotion of the arts and scholarship". But promotion means above all enabling encounters and dialogues—between authors and representatives of other literary professions: publishers, critics, journalists—and between the LCB’s guest authors and their audience, the readers.
The main means of promoting authors are the international grants and literary prizes awarded here. The LCB organises several highly respected literary competitions, including the "Alfred Döblin Prize" and the "Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair". Following a fairly long interval, the old tradition of workshops was revived in 1997 with the "Authors’ Prose Workshop". Alongside their grant, participants receive the chance to work on their texts with experienced colleagues in a calm atmosphere, discussing questions of themes, craft or poetics.
Beyond all this, the LCB is not only a forum, but also a protagonist of the literature industry. The editorial offices of "Sprache im technischen Zeitalter" made their home here in 1974. The magazine won the "Hermann Hesse Prize" in 2006, because it preserves "the culture of literary discussion" and "at the same time opens its doors to young authors of a new generation." And in that same year, the LCB initiated "Literaturport" in conjunction with the Brandenburg Literary Office—a virtual landscape of German-language literature open for visitors at www.literaturport.de.
As well as authors, translators and their work are particularly important to the LCB. Ultimately, contact to the great and the unknown voices of world literature comes mainly through their translators, the true go-betweens of literature. If the LCB is indeed, "viewed from abroad, an irreplaceable model, a shining beacon", as Paul Nizon writes, then surely partly because literary translation has been highly important here for many years. The LCB consistently promotes the international transfer of literature and literary translation—in both directions. Since 1997, the house has also been home to the "German Translators’ Fund", a national institution dedicated solely to promoting the art of translation.
But the house on the Wannsee is not only a guesthouse, conference facility and academy, but also a venue for more than a hundred public events every year. The LCB’s summer festival is the highpoint of the literary calendar for several thousand visitors, year after year.
The LCB’s partners include the Goethe Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and its Berlin artists programme, the German Foreign Ministry, the Robert Bosch Foundation, Pro Helvetia, the Allianz Foundation for Culture, the Preußische Seehandlung Foundation, Deutschlandfunk and the Leipzig Book Fair.
Hans-Joachim Neubauer
HALMA grant holder Filipa Melo wrote about her stay at the Literary Colloquium Berlin. Her essay is available in the European Library of the HALMA network.