2022: Ilija Trojanow, “The Utopian Prerogative”

2022 Mosse Lecture Poster

Ilija Trojanow, “The Utopian Prerogative”
1 September 2022, 17:00 PDT
David Brower Center

Sponsors: Mosse Lectures, Mosse Foundation, UC Berkeley Department of German, Institute of European Studies, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley
Moderated by Professor Deniz Göktürk

Each day we are sold different versions of yesterday, but rarely offered a different tomorrow. The apocalypse streams into every household at a flat rate. In an era of dystopian forebodings, the future can no longer be taken for granted, and optimism is under siege. It seems high time for a reboot of utopian literature, in which a space that is not, may yet come to be in the future. We are near forgetting that history is not a foregone conclusion, and that fatalism is the last refuge of the coward. How we shape the future lies in our own hands, but with the prerequisite that we are ready to think ahead, into the unknown and uncertain, imagining alternatives to given paradigms. If the seeds of human progress are indeed planted by ideas before they can blossom into transformations, utopian narratives are of existential importance.” – Ilija Trojanow speaks as a novelist who has spent the past years working on a utopian novel and exploring the history of Utopia. A political activist, he initiated Der utopische Raum, a multimedia platform for debate on visionary, provocative thinking in Vienna, Frankfurt, and soon, Hamburg. At a time when we reckon with our destruction of nature and of imagination, Trojanow’s work encourages us to scrub clear our overclouded skies and remind ourselves: what is literature if not unshackled fancy?

Ilija Trojanow is the most worldly and well-traveled among writers in the German language. Carrie Smith-Prei called him “a cosmopolitical public intellectual.” He is a prolific transnational writer, translator, and editor who works across language as a Sprachwechsler, and has published some 40 books, many of which have been translated into multiple languages. Born in Bulgaria, he has lived in Germany, Kenya, India, and Austria. In 2001, he crossed Tanzania on foot, retracing the routes of British Orientalist explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton whom he featured in his bestselling novel Der Weltensammler (2006) / The Collector of Worlds (2009) – for which he was awarded the prize of the Leizig Book Fair – and in Nomade auf vier Kontinenten (A Nomad on Four Continents, 2007).

Trojanow has reported regularly on India, Africa, and other parts of the world for newspapers such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and other papers, and he has published multiple volumes of collected essays. He continues to write about current controversies in the column Schlagloch in Die Tageszeitung. With Ranjit Hoskote, he co-authored Kampfabsage (2007) / Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West (2012). In his ecofictional novel EisTau (2011) / The Lamentations of Zeno (2016), he took on the melting of glaciers and travels to Antartica. We might get to hear a brief passage from that book at the end of today’s discussion. Further recent books include: Macht und Widerstand (Power and Resistance, 2015), the gripping memories of an aging dissident in Bulgaria; Nach der Flucht (After Flight, 2017), which is inspired by African American painter Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and composed of aphorisms and short scenes that encapsulate the experience of exile. The essay “Hilfe? Hilfe! Wege aus der globalen Krise” (“Aid? Aid! Ways out of Global Crisis”) (co-authored with Thomas Gebauer, 2018) offers a critique of philanthropy. Doppelte Spur (Dual Trace, 2020) is a Cold War novel about a dual agent. He is a masterful narrator, and he might well be Germany’s candidate for the Nobel Prize some day.