Grief is the Thing with the Knife
Walking through Volkspark Friedrichshain with Max Czollek & Jo Frank

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Poets' Corner
Reading
Poesiefestival Berlin 2026
Volkspark Friedrichshain
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Max Czollek © Dirk Skiba

Jo Frank © gezett

‘Why does the poem pass through the body without wounding it?’ asks poet, curator, and writer Max Czollek in a cycle of poems. The author and publisher Jo Frank takes up this question in his essay Trauer — ‘Grief cannot be invited. It stands in the doorway, pulls you close, and leads you into a room you never built for it.’

Max Czollek and Jo Frank have known each other for a long time — as friends, as writers and editors, through the highs and lows of recent years, which were mostly lows. They share the theme of grief, but not the definition of the term: for Czollek, private grief and political despair touch each other in and through literature — as requiem, as counter‑design, as the abyss beneath language. Frank, by contrast, insists that the core of grief is the individual body, the singular stories of living and dying. Societies organize grief. They do not feel it.

Walking through Volkspark Friedrichshain — a space inscribed with violence — the two read from their texts, talk, and explore the possibility of a language of grief(s) and grieving that may always have to stand in the plural.

The event will take place in German.

Meeting point for the walk and headphone distribution: Märchenbrunnen in Volkspark Friedrichshain. Registration is mandatory at mail@hausfuerpoesie.org