Nora Gomringer: The child practices death on the guinea pig - 39th Freiburg Literature Talk: Long evening of readings, talks and vinyl beats

Host: Gesa Schneider, DJ set: Scratch Dee

What the fermata is to music, the gap is to mourning. The hyphen between the years on her mother's gravestone stands for a life full of riddles. "As a missing daughter, as an angry woman, as a silenced poet", Nora Gomringer has made her mother's unconventional life, her morbid humor, advice and forlornness the subject of a memoir text: "Am Meerschwein übt das Kind den Tod" (Voland & Quist, 2025). In her debut novel, the multi-award-winning poet and performer tells a deeply touching and subtly funny story about childhood places, handwritten recipe slips, daydreams and nightmares and the matter of guinea pigs.

The shocks of grief lead to a musical aftershock: When Nora Gomringer removed her mother's deathbed, she found forty LPs in the bedside cabinet, attesting to the deceased collector's exquisite, soulful taste in music. After the reading and discussion with Nora Gomringer and literary scholar and curator Gesa Schneider, DJ Scratch Dee mixes the vinyl beats on the Literaturhaus stage and lets what remains resonate: life, a hyphen.
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Photo: © Judith Kinitz

Sponsors: Cultural Office of the City of Freiburg, Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg, Sparkasse Freiburg-Nördlicher Breisgau, Guzzoni-Federer-Stiftung, Schweizer Kulturstiftung Pro Helvetia and Lyrikempfehlungen für Kinder, kindly supported by jos fritz bookshop and Park Hotel Post

Date: 7.11.2025, 7 pm
Venue: Literaturhaus, Bertoldstrasse 17
Admission: 11/7 euros

Literature talk
Literaturhaus