AKADEMIE FORUM: ULRIKE DRAESNER

How does one address the greatest myth in Western cultural history? By putting it in a pickle jar—after all, it has to be conveyed from one place to another. At least that is what Penelope and her companions do when Ulrike Draesner sends them out to sea to provide the world with an alternative narrative to the patriarchal model.

Penelope—the epitome of the faithful wife, impeccable in her fulfilment of her role as a modestly serving spouse. Ulrike Draesner boldly throws this narrative overboard and opens up a multitude of new perspectives: on Penelope as a person and on her desires, her energy, her departure into a new life. On the enduring impact of the ancient Greek image of women and men. And, last but not least, on the question of what a good government means. Draesner’s Penelope is intelligent, passionate, freedom-loving. When it becomes clear that Odysseus, traumatized and brutalized by war, is no longer fit to rule, she sets sail with a hundred women. With tricks that include sirens, grandmothers, and flying fish, they escape their pursuers on a specially built ship. The journey is adventurous. It leads into the unknown, not just geographically. The difference between free Hellenic women and their African slave women is the first thing to melt away. More and more women raise their voices and demand their rights. In the end, a colorful society arrives in the lagoon we now call Venice. The task at hand is to create a new home for everyone. Even mosquitoes are best fought jointly.

penelopes sch()iff (Penelope’s Ship), Ulrike Draesner’s reinterpretation of the ancestral tale of Western literature, dazzles with its fearlessness, inventiveness, wit, and poetic fervor. Everything is in motion in this post-epic, yet everything remains connected: languages, spaces, times, meaning. The polyphony and diversity already present in Homer's hexameters are boldly and lucidly developed further by Draesner.

Ulrike Draesner, born in Munich in 1962, received numerous awards for her novels, essays, and poetry. Most recently, she received the Gisela Elsner Literature Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize, the Georg Dehio Book Prize, and the German Literature Fund Grand Prize for her entire body of work, which includes multimedia works and translations. Her novel Die Verwandelten was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. From 2015 to 2017, Draesner lived and worked in the UK. Following various international guest lectureships and lectures on poetry, she has been a professor at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig since 2018. She is a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and of the German Academy for Language and Literature. She lives in Berlin with her daughter.

Presented in German
With a musical contribution by students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie