Aron Boks – Starkstromzeit

In the organizer's words:

Aron Boks reads from his new book "Starkstromzeit. About life in a state that no longer exists"
November 13, 2025 | Admission 6:30 pm, start 7 pm | Weltecho Studio

What remains when the light of the future goes out? Aron Boks discovers a lamp in an old GDR magazine - designed by his grandfather. With their own lighting and decoration business, his grandparents were one of the few self-employed people in the GDR. They designed lamps with fabric shades, tassels and pompoms for private sale. At the same time, they received state commissions for hotels and vacation homes, where their futuristic-looking glass modules were used to illuminate socialism. After reunification, the lights disappeared - and with them the story behind them. Aron Boks goes in search of traces and tells a personal, unusual story of the GDR. It is about consumption and design, remembrance and the question of how objects continue to shine long after the system that created them has disappeared. "At some point, I could no longer bear to look at this photo in the GDR magazine, which still tells of my grandfather's lamps and ideas before the fall of communism. I finally wanted to have something that I could touch, that I could grasp and use. I didn't want to accept that a part of my history would remain blocked to me by mucking out the history of others."

The author
Aron Boks was born in Wernigerode in 1997 and lives as an author, slam poet and presenter in Berlin-Charlottenburg. In 2019, he received the Klopstock Prize for New Literature. Since 2021, he has written mainly for the taz and the taz.FUTUR-ZWEI column "Stimme meiner Generation". His book "Nackt in die DDR" about his great-granduncle Willi Sitte was published in 2023 and received a great deal of media attention. Aron never experienced the GDR himself, so he is all the more interested in how the country's history still shapes him today.