Veranstaltung: Samuel Beckett: ‚The German Room‘

Samuel Beckett, one of the best-known and most popular writers of the 20th century, is, as an Irishman, usually categorised as part of Irish literary history, although he initially wrote many of his works in French. What is less well known is that Beckett had an extensive knowledge of Italian and German in addition to English and French – accordingly, his texts are interspersed with expressions and allusions from these languages. But it is not only in this sense that Beckett is a multilingual author: to read Beckett's work is to learn the multitude of languages he uses, to explore the variety of means he employs for communication and literary composition. These include not only foreign languages, special and technical terminology, obsolete and remote words, neologisms, quotations, repetitions, elliptical syntax or linguistic “micro-prisons” (created through self-contradiction, such as in ‘on’), but also gestures and postures, movements and obstructions, spatial configurations, music and silence, sounds, colours, temperatures, points of the compass, camera perspectives and much more. The visit to the “German Room”, as an attempt to explore Beckett’s intense relationship with the German language, with German literature and culture, is therefore only a small part of the long-term project to which every Beckett reader must dedicate themselves: learning to understand the multitude of his languages.

The fact that this experiment takes place in a closed room is part of the exhibition concept: Beckett’s figures – including the artificial author figures that coexist with his other creatures – mostly live in closed rooms, with no way out except by imagination and memory. The expression ‘The German Room’ alludes to Beckett’s early story ‘Dante and the Lobster’, where – after describing the location of the “French room” in the language academy – it says: ‘God knows where the German room was.’ The exhibition thus, finally, opens Beckett's “German Room” to the public and invites visitors to familiarise themselves with – and to learn to read – the many dimensions of the ‘German Beckett’.