Endlichkeitsdialoge - Das Festival

In the organizer's words:

On November 23, 2025, on the occasion of the Sunday of the Dead and thanks to a wonderful teamwork in favor of the Leipziger Haus Leben e. V., there will be the benefit festival "Endlichkeitsdialoge".

We want to build a bridge between the best entertainment and the exploration of what death, with all its facets, is all about. Our motto is: the more intensively we deal with the topic of death, the more consciously we can live our lives. And so we want to let literature and music enter into a dialog with this complex of topics, illuminate the one or other humorous side of it and also make light, hope and liveliness the subject of the finality dialogs.

Our (provisional) running order:

15.00 hrs
Admission

3.20 p.m.
Opening

3.40 pm
Musical reading with Luci van Org from "We Five and I and the Dead"
On her way to the subway, Vera finds three dead bodies in a locker and is suspected of murder from then on. She can't remember anything - and what do the stalker with the child's face, the evangelical punk girl and the woman with the mother's bag have to do with it? Vera only realizes how much danger she is getting into in her search for the truth when it is almost too late. The only thing that can save her now is to make peace with herself, but that is harder than she thought. Because Vera really is a murderer - and that's a damn good thing.

4.10 p.m.
Dr. Marcus Schwarz
Forensic entomologist, expert witness and author Dr. Marcus Schwarz has turned his passion for the scientific investigation of crimes into a profession. He will provide fascinating insights into his work with death and talk about how expert reports are prepared for courts in the context of criminal cases.

16.40 hrs
Benjamin Schmidt reads from "To be or not to be - suicide in science and art"
Many years ago, suicide was the last option for Benjamin Schmidt. On the one hand, it is a great stroke of luck that he failed to take the plunge. On the other hand, this suicide attempt drastically changed Benjamin's life. Benjamin Schmidt contributed to the anthology "To Be or Not to Be - Suicide in Science and Art" with the story "Lets talk about suicide", in which he provides insights into his very personal experiences with the suicide attempt and the time afterwards.

17.10 hrs
Break

17.30 hrs
Ulrike Serowy reads from "Highway to Hel"
The likeable student Max has a macabre side job: he watches the dead die. One day he finds himself in a particularly bizarre situation: a young woman wakes up in her coffin and Max is the only one who can help her. From then on, the two of them have to answer a few vital questions: What is Claire doing in that coffin anyway? What is this Vegvísir who keeps popping up? And why should you always have a salami to hand in the afterlife? On the hunt for answers, the two repeatedly get into bizarre situations and travel from Cologne via Berlin to Iceland, where they have to descend into the world of the dead to bring Claire back to life.

18.00 hrs
Auction for the benefit of Haus Leben e. V.
Maria Förster and Kathrin Schreier, together with Luci van Org and Florentine Joop, will auction off some wonderful, rare and artistic items, the proceeds of which will go to Haus Leben e. V.

6.20 pm
Christian von Aster reads from "Schnitter, Gevatter und Sensenmann - all kinds of stories about death"
When you open this volume of stories to approach death with the help of Christian von Aster's tales, you quickly sense how the author engages in a new dance with each story in order to feel its rhythm, its heartbeat and to open up a new space for the subject in each of them. In the end, there are fifteen texts that, sometimes influenced by the author's work as a funeral orator, sometimes as a satirist, always enter into a dialogue between tenderness, poetry, black humor and the unspeakable with the mystically morbid symbolic and formal language of the illustrations that Maximiliane Spieß has created especially for this collection.

18.50 hrs
Break

19.10 hrs
Talk on the subject of finiteness
Kathrin Schreier and M. Kruppe enter into conversation with our artists. What does finiteness mean? How can death be understood? Why is it necessary to talk about it and expose it to cultural perspectives? How can we take the horror out of death?

7.40 pm
Sarah Lesch
The exceptional musician Sarah Lesch, who lives in Leipzig and has won several awards, is one of the most important protagonists of the new German singer-songwriter scene. She will talk about the transience of life and her relationship to death and perform a small selection of wonderful pieces of music.

20.10 hrs
Closing and farewell

The evening will be hosted by Kathrin Schreier and M. Kruppe.
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The festival is a team effort between the Perimortal Institute, the publishing house Edition Outbird, Haus Leben e. V., Werk 2 as well as the independent funeral speaker Kahrin Schreier and the Leipzig author, organizer and reciter M. Kruppe.

The festival will feature the following supporting events:

- an information stand of Haus Leben e. V., where visitors can find out about the work for people with cancer and their relatives.
- the Linzer Sargbar, whose team offers space and time to discuss, explore and jointly break taboos on the subject of death and mortality.
- an information stand of the Perimortal Institute for End-of-Life Culture, which offers training in grief counseling, support for those experiencing loss and support for grief activists. And which sees it as its task to bring the topics of dying, death, mourning and life itself back into people's conversations and thus back into society.
- a book table from the Gera-based publishing house Edition Outbird, which focuses on alternative worlds, material with character and edge and stories from the fringes of the mainstream and offers numerous novels and short story collections that reflect on the topic of death, among other things.