Elizabeth Rosner: Beyond This Forest / Jenseits dieses Waldes

In the organizer's words:

German texts read by chamber actress Barbara Blümel

Elizabeth Rosner (born 1959 in Schenectady, New York) is one of the most important voices of the second generation in the USA. Her father, a German Jew from Hamburg, was a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp, her mother, a Polish Jew, survived the Vilna ghetto. After liberation, they emigrated to the USA.

In Beyond this Forest, Rosner uses poems and prose to process the traces of memory, loss and survival, but also the struggle for the meaning of language, religion and inherited experience for her life as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She vividly and precisely describes ruptures in family history, speechlessness and possibilities for reconciliation - with her father, but also with descendants of the perpetrators.

This bilingual book, which will be published in 2026 by the Leipzig-based publishing house for Jewish culture and contemporary history Hentrich & Hentrich, brings together these poems in German translation for the first time. The translation was created as part of a university project at the Technical University of Dortmund with a group of students from the Faculty of Cultural Studies, who took on the challenge of translating Rosner's language of remembrance into German in close collaboration with the author. Jenseits dieses Wald thus becomes an encounter not only between languages and cultures, but also between generations.

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