There is no past in Berlin

In the organizer's words:

Berlin is a city shaped by breaks:
the break of 1933,
the break of 1945,
the break of 1961,
the break of 1989.

A city rebuilt again and again out of interruption.
A place where streets are renamed, maps redrawn, borders erased and redrawn, identities rearranged with them.
Where people arrive not only from other countries, but from every corner of Germany: carrying childhoods, dialects, silences, and stories that don't fit neatly into the myth of a constantly "new" Berlin.
Yet, the city whispers:
"There is no past here."
A city of reinvention,
but also a city where the past sits just beneath the surface:
in the architecture, in the demographics, in the unspoken tensions,
in the generations who migrated inward or outward, seeking a different life.
This event brings together four authors whose works reclaim these layers.

Ioana Cristina Casapu, Larg Jongblod, Tom Bresemann and Anastasia Patsouri open a conversation about the past we inherit, even when we migrate inside our own country, the past we confront when we cross external borders, the past that Berlin both protects and refuses to confront, the past that returns when strangers meet on a page and recognize themselves.

Berlin becomes the meeting point:
a crossroads of dislocated biographies, lost languages, family traumas, new freedoms, and long shadows.
This event is an invitation to read this city not as a blank beginning, but as a palimpsest trembling with memory.

"There Is No Past in Berlin" is a pilot literary project initiated by Ioana Cristina Casapu and Lars Jongeblod. It creates a recurring space for authors to meet and engage with one another on the many facets of living and writing in Berlin.
Each edition invites a changing constellation of writers who bring different biographies, languages, generations, and forms of experience into conversation. Rather than following fixed moderation roles or hierarchical formats, the project is conceived as an open exchange, allowing dialogue to develop organically between participants, texts, and the audience.

Ioana Cristina Casapu (b. Romania) is a Berlin-based author whose work has appeared in over 30 anthologies and magazines in English and Romanian. She made her debut in 2016 with the novel Deviații de Stereo (Casa de Pariuri Literare, Bucharest), which was published in 2019 under the title Heart Beats: A Memoir of The Millennial Generation on Social Media. Her writing explores migration, feminism, social ruptures, loneliness in European metropolises, and global culture, and has been published in outlets including DAZED, Thought Catalog, Goethe-Institut, Berlin Art Parasites, DILEMA, and Stadtsprachen Magazin. In 2024, she founded FLINTA* Literatur, Berlin's platform for FLINTA* authors with migration or displacement backgrounds. Her latest book, Berliner Tagebuch. Die Geschichte meiner inneren Mauer (translated from Romanian by Gundel Große) was published in September 2025 by KLAK Verlag.

Lars Jongeblod is a poet and a literary and cultural organizer in Berlin. His texts have been adapted into songs, and have accompanied photo series' and performances in streets, workshops, studios, parks and schools. His novel Über die Zäune (Over the Fences), which won the Raniser Debut Prize, was published in 2017. He is a scholarship holder for German-language literature (2021) from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. His poem Water was collectively adapted into a poetry film (Co-production Berlin/Germany - Quito/Ecuador) and shown at international literature and film festivals, including ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival, Berlin (2025).

Tom Bresemann was born 1978 in Berlin, where he writes, publishes, lives and organizes events. Since 2004 he published various texts in magazines and anthologies, as well as various poetry collections and prose. His texts were translated to English, Italian, Swedish, Greek, Spanish and Hebrew. His poetry is considered as political - critics consider it "rebellious". Critics wrote: "His poems are Guerilla-Poetry, poetical Street-Art. An ugly spot that turns out to be a mirror. "He is often working conceptually with language material from outside of literature and poetry. The poems confront readers strongly and often in an escalating manner, forcing them to take position towards the discussed topics and materials in them. He considers political poetry as a tool for open discussion rather than easy agreement. In 2006 he founded Lettrétage together with Moritz Malsch and Katharina Deloglu. He organized several reading series and international conferences. He is the co-Director of the Lettrétage. He was the artistic director of the SOUNDOUT! Festival for New Ways of Presenting Literature. He is one of the initiators of the international CROWD network.

Anastasia Patsouri aka Anar Sea, is an Athenian poet, performer, economist and researcher, based in Berlin. After graduating from Athens College, Anastasia studied Economics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where she also earned a master's degree in Interdisciplinary Crisis Management. Today she is a PhD Candidate on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Sustainability at the Technical University of Berlin and the Panteion University of Athens. She has worked on International Diplomacy in Vienna and as a senior executive in diverse start-ups in Berlin. Her poetic journey began with the collection En Kinisei (24grammata Editions), followed by The Visionaries (Wipf & Stock Publications), and most recently Oneiropoloi (Smili Editions), through which her voice belongs to contemporary Greek and English poetry. Her work is characterized by succinct, sensual, and powerful verses that weave together themes of erotic love, self-empowerment, passion, nature, freedom, mythology, philosophy and politics. Through evocative imagery and rhythmic language, Anastasia transforms everyday encounters and issues into poetic explorations of tenderness, self-discovery or criticism. She invites readers into a world where emotions, landscapes, and myths converge to celebrate poetry as a path to knowledge and inner revolution. In Berlin, Anastasia co-founded Pleiades, a poetry collective curating and organizing poetry events, workshops and performing acts. She is also active as a performer in the different stages of Berlin and Athens, promoting and vocalizing poetry. Anastasia also collaborates with music producers in Berlin and Athens, transforming her poetry into music, with two album releases (Mabui Music Producers) along with independent singles (Tonic D Records).