Mathias Göritz

German poet, prose author, essayist and translator; renowned representative of the “middle generation” of German authors. At the beginning of the 1990s he travelled a great deal – first to Moscow, where in order to support himself, he taught German for a year and a half; then later he went to Paris and Japan, and for three and a half years he lived in the United States. He is the author of two books of poetry, Loops (2001) and Pools (2006) and the novel Der kurze Traum des Jakob Voss (The Short Dream of Jakob Voss). Göritz’s story stems from one sentence by Isaac Bashevis Singer: “For animals, all humans are Nazis, and their life is an eternal Treblinka”. The book achieved success in Germany, received several important awards and resulted in discussion of the German identity. The action takes place in the 1980s, and the main character is the mayor of a city who resigns from his political career, sells his belongings and moves to a village to start a poultry farm. Like Göritz’s father, he is a refugee from the East and hopes to erase the guilt of his forefathers. He took part in the famed play Transfer by Jan Klata (premiere in 2006) – a documentary spectacle about refugees at the Teatr Współczesny (Contemporary Theatre) in Wrocław. He is the author of a book published in a Polish edition entitled Paul Celan. Miasta i Miejsca (Paul Celan. Cities and Places), in which he sets all the richness of the works of the author of Fugue of Death against the backdrop of the colourful culture of Galicia. As a guest of the Second Joseph Conrad International Literature Festival, he took part in the meeting entitled Wschód-Zachód (East-West) along with Ukrainian writer Serhiy Viktorovych Zhadan.