Several intimate, long-standing experts on the life and work of Peter Suhrkamp will be guests at the university in October. The university is dedicating several events to the Kirchhatten-born publisher in the year of his 125th birthday.
Some of these are embedded in the "Protestant Profiles" series, which the philosopher Prof Dr Matthias Bormuth has been organising since April in co-operation with the Karl Jaspers Society, the Academy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Oldenburg, St. Lambert's Church and the Oldenburg State Library.
The series of events on Suhrkamp is intended to illustrate "the importance of the book and publishing industry for education and movements of ideas alongside and in relation to the university", says Bormuth, who holds a Heisenberg professorship for Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Oldenburg.
The event will kick off on Tuesday, 11 October with a text collage entitled "'Reading in order to learn. - Peter Suhrkamp and the idea of education", which will be read by the former head of the former Suhrkamp archive in Frankfurt, Wolfgang Schopf. The event starts at 7.30 pm in the Karl Jaspers-Haus (Unter den Eichen 22).
Schopf, now head of the literary archive at the University of Frankfurt am Main, will also open an exhibition on Peter Suhrkamp in the Oldenburg University Library (Uhlhornsweg 49-55) as curator on Tuesday, 18 October at 6.30 pm. Entitled "So I simply dared to do it with the book", the show, which will be on display until the end of November, traces Suhrkamp's path from teacher training seminar to his own publishing house.
Shortly before the official opening of the exhibition, at 5.00 pm, there will be a lecture in the library hall on "Peter Suhrkamp and his literary credo". The question "Can the book help us?" will be the centre of the lecture by Dr Jan Bürger, head of the current Suhrkamp archive at the German Literature Archive in Marbach.
The recently published correspondence with his wife Annemarie Seidel ("Nun leb wohl! Und hab's gut!"), from which Wolfgang Schopf will read on Wednesday, 26 October, offers insights into Suhrkamp's private views and his activities in the publishing business. The event starts at 7.30 pm at the Wilhelm13 Music and Literature Centre (Leo-Trepp-Straße 13). This event is being organised in co-operation with the Oldenburg Literature Office.
The final and highlight of the series of events will be a Peter Suhrkamp lecture on Thursday, 27 October, with the former Hanser publisher, Suhrkamp author and current President of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Dr Michael Krüger, and the Munich literary historian, Suhrkamp consultant and former President of the German Research Foundation (DFG), Prof. Dr Wolfgang Frühwald. From 4.00 pm, they will take to the podium in the university's library hall: Krüger will describe his unorthodox educational path under the title "Suhrkamp was my university", Frühwald will respond as an academic with "My friends, the publishers - memories of a professor".
Admission to the events in the library hall is free, the others are subject to a charge. Members of the Karl Jaspers Society receive reduced admission.
