Walking among Berlin's exhibited bones
A Walk Through the Museum

Sold out
Poets' Corner
Poesiefestival Berlin 2026
Naturkundemuseum
← / →

Lara Rüter © Michael Bader

Brandon Kilbourne © Jamila K. Grote

Sabine Scho © Matthias Holtmann

Elvira Steppacher © Lena Semmelroggen

‘At the feet of a precipe-tall skeleton,’ is where Brandon Kilbourne begins a walk through Berlin’s Natural History Museum in the poem The Giraffe Titan I. This walk brushes against past and present alike, confronting us with questions of who we are and how we perceive ourselves. On this afternoon, four poets will guide visitors through the Natural History Museum with their poems.

Brandon Kilbourne’s life‑world of biology has only in recent years found its way into his poetry. His particular interest lies in the colonial entanglements of natural‑history collections. His poetry debut Natural History (Graywolf Press 2025), awarded the Cave Canem Prize, traces the evolutionary and provenance histories of the objects in his working environment: from the famous skeleton of the “Giraffatitan brancai,” which arrived in Berlin from what was then the colony of German East Africa, to dioramas whose idyllic surfaces conceal a quiet violence.

Lara Rüter’s poetry sinks into the co‑dependence between the researched and the researcher. Already in her debut amoretten in netzen (Wunderhorn 2024), she devoted herself to “romantically foolish” animals — dolphins, Greenland sharks, and a white mammoth — guiding her readers into the Pongoland of Leipzig Zoo, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the Atlantis Memorial Reef. Her observations, human and animal, drawn from five years at the primate research institute, appeared in March 2026 in her lyric essay collection Affenliebe (Hanser 2026).

Elvira Steppacher’s poetry penetrates directly into the suspended lives of animals. Obsession exceeds biographical fact and extends to the meticulous inscription of the preparation of Bobby’s monkey hand. In her collection Einst werden wir Endlinge sein (Elif Verlag 2024), animal bodies appear as artifacts of injury, as carriers of cultural and colonial narratives. As she writes: “Poems, too, prepare and exhibit. Reason enough to give space to the human appropriation of animal biographies.”

Sabine Scho is known for weaving her poetry multimodally with other disciplines such as photography, art, and performance. As early as 2015, together with Andreas Töpfer, she developed the poetic intervention The Origin of Senses at the Natural History Museum, which interrogates the perception of visitors as much as that of the exhibited beings. In her collection Tiere in Architektur (kookbooks 2013), the zoo becomes a site for poetically exposing how human modes of perception and knowledge function — and how they might function otherwise.

The event takes place in German and English.

Advance registration at mail@hausfuerpoesie.org is required. The €5 ticket can be purchased on site on the day of the event.