Governments form and fall, but one trend is holding strong: geographic polarization. The most determining factor whether you vote for the AfD in Germany or Trump/Vance in the US is not gender, class or ethnicity, but place: the region where you live. This is a challenge not only for democratic systems, but also for writers. Who can legitimately report on disaffected regions? And to what political effect?
In this episode of our talk series Berlin Review Audio, we speak with writers familiar with two disaffected territories that share the trauma of post-industrial decline and a taste for extractivist nostalgia: the Appalachian Region in the American Midwest and South, and the Ruhrgebiet in Germany’s Deep West.
For Berlin Review No 7, Lena Fiedler has written about JD Vance and her visit to his hometown in Ohio, while the writing of our second invitee, Karosh Taha, lyrically reflects her upbringing and social tensions in the Ruhrgebiet. Our third guest, Lauren Oyler, was born and raised in West Virginia — for Harper’s Magazine, she reported on the Republican National Convention and the «revenge plot» that an incoming Trump/Vance administration is putting in motion as we speak.
Join us for a Friday night bar reading and discussion, moderated by Matthias Ubl and Tobias Haberkorn.
Lena Fiedler was born and raised in Essen, Ruhrgebiet, and lives in Berlin. Her journalistic writing has appeared, among other places, in Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Berliner Zeitung. Together with Helene von Schwichow, she is the author of Ruhrtopien (2020), a volume on the end of the industrial era in Ruhrgebiet. During the Summer of 2024, she reported from the Appalachian region. Her travelogue «Down in Middletown» on JD Vance’s hometown appeared in Berlin Review No 7.
Karosh Taha was born in the Kurdish city of Zaxo and moved to Western Germany as a child. She studied English and History at the University of Duisburg-Essen and, in addition to her work as an author, initially worked as a high school teacher in Essen. She lives between Cologne and Paris. Her novels Beschreibung einer Krabbenwanderung and “Im Bauch einer Königin* were published by DuMont in 2018 and 2020.
Lauren Oyler was born and raised in West Virginia and lives in Berlin. She is the author of No Judgment, a collection of critical essays published earlier this year, and Fake Accounts, a novel published in 2021. Her essays on books and culture appear regularly in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and she is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. Lauren’s recent criticism includes a travelogue about W. G. Sebald’s hometown Wertach and an essay on the Republican National Convention 2024 for Harper’s.
Matthias Ubl is a contributing editor at Jacobin and the host of the podcast Jacobin Talks.
Tobias Haberkorn is a founding editor of Berlin Review.
Readings and discussions in German and English. Free entrance, limited seating. Recordings of the event will be made available in our podcast channel.
Bonus: Early copies of our Reader 2 — hot off the press — will be on sale.
Berlin Review Audio is supported by the Berlin Senate for Culture.