823 (banquet hall)
Nina-Rubinstein-Weg 1
60323 Frankfurt am Main
“James Baldwin is everywhere,” read a 2016 article in Time - and shortly thereafter, the American writer was “everywhere” in German-speaking countries as well. What does the enthusiasm with which his works are being rediscovered nearly forty years after his death tell us? The enormous willingness to see Baldwin—once a key voice in the American civil rights movement—as a source of inspiration, a provider of meaning, and a guide? And what does “everywhere” actually mean? On Instagram, postcards, and tote bags, catchy quotes taken out of complex contexts offer comfort and courage: is this, too, a contribution to the multifaceted discourse on race and gender, or rather an indication of its increasing narrowing? René Aguigah, who with his book James Baldwin. Der Zeuge (2024), the first German-language monograph on James Baldwin, and Miriam Mandelkow, who has been translating Baldwin’s works since 2018, speak with Bettina Kleiner and Christiane Thompson about this author and activist: about the reasons for his relevance today as well as aspects of his work that are particularly timely in the present day.
© Thomas Marek
Miriam Mandelkow has been working on new German translations of James Baldwin’s works for nearly ten years. Born in Amsterdam, she studied English and American literature in Hamburg and the United States, and after years as a freelance editor of international fiction, she became a translator of literature from English-language sources. Among the authors she has translated are Samuel Selvon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Vann, Richard Price, Eimear McBride, and NoViolet Bulawayo. She was awarded the Helmut M. Braem Translation Prize for her new translation of Baldwin’s debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (2020) and the Heinrich Maria Ledig Rowohlt Prize for her entire body of translation work (2025). Last winter semester, she held the August Wilhelm von Schlegel Visiting Professorship for the Poetics of Translation at the Szondi Institute of the Free University of Berlin. Miriam Mandelkow lives in Hamburg.
René Aguigah, born in 1974, studied history, philosophy, and journalism in Bochum and Dortmund. In the late 1990s, he wrote as a freelance journalist for the culture sections of taz, FAZ, and Frankfurter Rundschau. He then worked first as an editor and host at WDR 3, and later as the editor responsible for nonfiction at the magazine Literaturen. In 2010, he joined Deutschlandradio, where he currently heads the “Literature” department at Deutschlandfunk and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. From 2013 to 2015, he served on the jury for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. In 2023, he was a fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. In 2024, James Baldwin. Der Zeuge was published by C. H. Beck.
