The Literaturhaus Zürich occupies a six-story neo-Renaissance building in the old city center, a short walk from the main station. It is a gathering place for readers and writers, many of them international, an institution at once imbricated in the local publishing market and, also, external to it. The first thing that struck me when I arrived was that no one was selling anything; there were plenty of books in the library, but none being immediately peddled to the assembled crowd. On the panel, one author spoke knowledgeably about nuclear energy, another about the literary responsibility to address climate change. Afterward, over dinner at a local Italian chain, the conversation alighted on the inexhaustible topic of transatlantic comparison, in particular the differences in literary culture between Europe and the United States. I mourned aloud the fact that there simply wasn’t the same funding for the arts in the States. As we rose to leave, a Swiss woman with connections to literary publishing confessed quietly and in confidence, “You know, when I really want to read a good story, I read the Americans.”
To those of us accustomed to a U.S. literary ecosystem defined by publishing oligopoly, expensive MFA programs, and heavily marketed book launches, the idea of a “house for literature” insulated from market forces has immediate appeal. There are 15 official Literaturhäuser scattered throughout Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland, with additional institutions operating under other auspices. Similar houses, can be found throughout Europe — especially in France and Scandinavia — but the networking relationship between the German-language versions is unique, suggests Managing Director Ursula Steffens, who oversees accounting and financing for “cross-house” collaborations across 15 core members. A recent month’s worth of German-language programming at Literaturhäuser throughout central Europe included a reading of work by formerly incarcerated writers and a Saturday morning event for children starring Vampirkaninchen (“vampire bunnies”). At the Leipzig Haus, authors investigated Western blind spots in Eastern Europe against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, while the Stuttgart outpost awarded an annual prize for literature addressing economics and work. (This year’s winner connects the “difficult conditions” of contemporary agriculture to the “more general disappearance of meaning from modern life.”) Tickets range from 5 euros ($5) in Berlin to 20 Swiss francs ($21) in Zürich. (That’s Switzerland for you.)
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