Miscellaneous Leukerbad Literature Festival with restrictions due to Middle East war
The American Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen was supposed to be a guest at the Leukerbad Literature Festival this weekend. But now he is stuck in Israel - because of the war between Israel and Iran.
20.06.2025, 09:01
SDA
Joshua Cohen has been traveling a lot recently. In mid-May he was involved in the opening of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin, then he traveled to Tel Aviv and from there he wanted to come to the Leukerbad Literature Festival this weekend - as did the journalist and author Lee Yaron. The planned events with the two of them are now to take place in hybrid form. But here too, those responsible in Leukerbad are making a reservation: "As the security situation in Israel is currently very tense, it is possible that the events may not be able to take place at short notice or may have to be canceled early," they say on request.
In the run-up to the festival, Cohen spoke to the Keystone-SDA news agency about his essay collection "Notes from the Cave". In it, he reflects on his own reading, the American-Jewish diaspora and the manipulation of thoughts by the Internet. And in it, he deals with the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
With essays in the service of...
He writes essays "in the service of something: for those who read or for a deceased person whose literature I enjoyed reading, or for a particular idea that interests me, for something that I want to defend - or that I want to destroy".
The volume "Aufzeichnungen aus der Höhle" is a selection from around 20 years of writing that Cohen made together with his German-language translator Jan Wilm. In a striking number of essays, he reflects on European literature, such as Franz Kafka, Stendhal, Gregor von Rezzori and Bohumil Hrabal. "Americans are notorious for knowing frighteningly little about translated literature. A real deficit. I am one of the few people who regularly write about translated literature - in my regular column in 'Harper's Magazine' or in the Jewish magazine 'Forward'."
In the essay "Thoughts on Kafka", for example, Cohen describes how he is approached in Jerusalem about the Kafka translation he is currently reading. When asked what it is about, the ego replies abbreviated, "about an impossible situation" and is annoyed by his own foreign accent in Hebrew and that under the circumstances it sounds "as if I were quoting a journalistic euphemism for the conflict between Israel and Palestine".
Jewish-American identity
His own Jewish-American identity is one of several red threads that run through the volume. When he writes "about Donald Trump and the downfall of Atlantic City", his Jewish outsider perspective sharpens the perception of American contradictions: the essay tells of Cohen's childhood, of streets, casinos, but also of the fiction of America and the democratic world that we are all equal and that we are not at all.
For Cohen, the USA is a story of white immigration and slavery. "Both histories are undoubtedly important, but the debate about which of these histories should ultimately be considered superior is a zero-sum game. Atlantic City is about all these deep, swirling forces, feelings, urges and desires that underlie Trumpism," says Cohen in the interview.
Or the essay about Cohen's reading of Jared Kushner's memoirs in 2022: he describes the content as "prose-washing", i.e. fiction for image cultivation. Various other texts also observe such "storytelling" and the theatrical means of politics. Cohen calls right-wing populist American news platforms "counterfactual fanfiction broadcasting platforms".
As a writer, he feels committed to language, as he emphasizes: "I feel a responsibility - to the reader, in terms of style, or to an idea. It is impossible to describe something realistically, and every writer has to work on this impossibility - just as it is impossible but essential for journalists to strive for impartiality."
He feels that these journalistic principles are currently lacking: "The worrying thing is that most journalistic organs are political organs - but that's an old story. What is new is the story that politics itself is developing for us - with plots and twists that are intended to be consumed like entertainment, as if they had no life and death consequences."
Cohen conducted the interview with Keystone-SDA from Tel Aviv (on June 5), less than 100 kilometers away from a completely destroyed Gaza. The most recent essay in this volume is a collage of diary entries from the end of 2023 - an immediate and complex reaction to the massacre on October 7. It says, for example: "An interesting aspect of being called Joshua Cohen is that there is always someone else called Joshua Cohen who signs open letters about Israel." The essay ends in Gaza, which, according to Cohen, is partly made up of Hamas, but the majority are young people "who are desperate because of failure, who have been abused and neglected and who storm ahead because they have nowhere else to go but in front of the guns, who can do nothing but shoot".
Will to ambiguity
With his precise language and his analytical yet empathetic observations, Cohen is up against what he once called the "almost universal impatience of the present" and he celebrates a will to ambiguity that he attributes to a Central European tradition.
One of the important figures from this tradition for Cohen is the publisher Salmon Schocken, to whom the Jewish Museum in Berlin is currently dedicating an exhibition. According to Cohen, Schocken and his books were partly responsible for the transfer of European thought to America and the transplantation of the democratic-liberal idea to Israel, not least through the purchase of the still left-liberal newspaper Haaretz. Cohen wrote various texts for the exhibition and also places his writing here in the service of this deceased publisher and his idea, which he wishes to defend.
29th International Literature Festival Leukerbad:
33 writers from 14 countries gather for the 29th International Literature Festival in Leukerbad this weekend. The festival started with the traditional "literary hike" on Thursday with readings by Patrick Holzapfel and Meral Kureyshi.
The program on (today's) Friday and Saturday also starts with a "literary walk" with Mariann Bühler and Birgit Birnbacher. On Friday at midnight, Katja Lange-Müller will be reading on the Gemmi.
In the translators' colloquium, literary translators from different languages will be discussing the Swiss Book Prize winner Zora del Buono. On Saturday, they will give an insight into their workshop. Classic readings will take place in between.
The two authors Volker Braun and Christoph Geiser have known each other since Geiser from Basel visited Braun in the GDR in 1983; the German historian of Eastern Europe Karl Schlögel reflects on the USA; Moritz Bassler talks to Lukas Bärfuss and Stefan Zweifel about kitsch; Jens Balzer about "woke".
The discussion between Joshua Cohen and Christian Kracht has been canceled. Cohen and the "Haaretz" journalist Lee Yaron are to be connected via Zoom for the other planned events.
*This text by Philine Erni, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation
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