Grass on campus: International congress on five decades of media reception of the controversial Nobel laureate

In honor of the 80th birthday of Günter Grass Jacobs University and the Media Archive Günter Grass Foundation Bremen hold the conference “MediaGrass – National and international reception models” from September 28 to September 30 on the Jacobs campus. 15 renowned international experts will demonstrate how the media all over the world received Günter Grass as a politically active person as well as his work. Final highlight of the symposium is the top-class panel “Günter Grass – Views of a German writer” on Sunday morning, which is concluded by a reading of the Nobel laureate himself.

[ Sep 28, 2007]  More than five decades the work of Günter Grass and the life he dedicated to taking political stands was subject-matter of stormy public debates. The appreciation of his literary and political voice also outside of Germany often has been overlooked on the backdrop of the fierce national media controversy. The Grass conference therefore places a special emphasis on this aspect of Grass’ media reception. The experts from Egypt, England, Germany, Ireland, Russia, Spain, and the US will elucidate the media reception of the Nobel laureate with the help of media samples from their home countries as well as from China and Poland. (Program details in German)

Highlight of the conference will be the panel discussion „Günter Grass – Views of a German writer” on Sunday, September 30, at 11 a. m. The panel will consist of Jutta Limbach, President of the Goethe Institute and former President of the Federal Constitutional Court, Eckhard Fuhr, head of the feature pages of the national newspaper „Die Welt“, Per Øhrgaard, Professor of German Language and Literature Studies at Copenhagen Business School and Grass interpreter, Hendrik Birus, Dean of the Jacobs School of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor for General and Comparative Literature, as well as Joachim Treusch, Jacobs University President and Theoretical Physicist. The panel discussion is presented by Harro Zimmermann, head of the literature department of Radio Bremen and Professor for New German Literature at the University of Bremen. Nobel laureate Günter Grass will be present at the panel discussion and will give a concluding reading of his poetry.