Reading and Talk with Heinz Bude, Bettina Munk and Karin Wieland

Reading by Heinz Bude, Bettina Munk, and Karin Wieland from Transit 64 (Hanser 2025), followed by a conversation with Elisa Tamaschke

Marlene Dietrich as Federal President? Divided Berlin is the setting for a confusing mix of facts and fiction

It is cold in East Berlin when Marlene Dietrich lands for a stopover in her former hometown in January 1964. She has broken with Germany and wants to travel on to Warsaw as quickly as possible. But two men are waiting for her in West Berlin: Governing Mayor Willy Brandt and his spokesman Egon Bahr want her to run against former Nazi Heinrich Lübke in the presidential election. What if it had happened that way? On the stage of the Cold War, BudeMunkWieland weaves a crazy story out of fiction, facts and images. It’s about freedom, dictatorship, resistance, exile and conformity, and extends the 20th century into the present.