THERE IS NO PAST IN BERLIN: Ioana Cristina Casapu in conversation with Alexander Wells
Lettrétage- Datum
- Ort
- Lettrétage
- Adresse
- Veteranenstr. 21, 10119 Berlin
- Verlag
- Lettrétage
“Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never tobeing.” So wrote German art critic Karl Scheffler in his 1910 book Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal . More than a century, two world wars, a divided city and countless reinventions later, his verdict still sounds remarkably accurate. Berlin is forever becoming something else, while the ghosts of its previous lives refuse to leave. In the week marking 37 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reading and live-interview project There Is No Past in Berlin opens its doors for the second time. On 12 November at 7 pm, Romanian author and curator Ioana Cristina Casapu and Australian writer and critic Alexander Wells meet on stage at Lettrétage for an intimate evening of readings, conversation and mutual interviewing. Against the backdrop of one of the most consequential weeks in modern German history, they revisit the city that emerged from the opening of the Wall and its borders: a place where generations of migrant writers, including themselves, would come to live, work, dream and begin again. But how much of the past do we carry with us into a new life? The evening follows their footsteps alongside those of literary predecessors who arrived in Berlin almost a century ago, looking for freedom, inspiration, a room of their own or simply a place to write. In Berliner Tagebuch – Die Geschichte meiner inneren Mauer (2025), living in Schöneberg in 2019, writing from a tiny blue bedroom inside a sprawling apartment that once belonged to an art historian. The flat had the faded decadence of a paradiso perdutp , its atmosphere somewhere between 1920s Berlin and Miss Havisham's gorgeously decaying mansion in Great Expectations . In 2021 she discovered that the floor plan was identical to that of the apartment once inhabited by Christopher Isherwood, the British writer whose accounts of Weimar Berlin would inspire Cabaret. Stranger still, she subsequently learned that two other Romanian writers she knew had lived in that very same blue room. Wells has explored similar encounters between literature, history and the city. In his essay Toward a Vision of Post-COVID Urban Space: Joseph Roth'sCity of Miniatures (2022), he follows the footsteps of Joseph Roth, the Austrian-Jewish writer who wandered through 1920s Berlin, documenting its strangers, immigrants, outsiders and forgotten corners. In What Are Young Australians Searching for in Berlin? (2020), Wells turns a more critical eye on his own generation of arrivals, questioning the fascination with Berlin's ruins, its promise of freedom and the uncomfortable histories that international newcomers sometimes prefer to overlook. His essay The Spies of Others (2021) examines another kind of selective memory: how the East German Stasi became part of a reassuring Western narrative about the Cold War. Between Isherwood's Schöneberg, Roth's restless streets, the fall of the Wall and today's increasingly expensive, perpetually unfinished capital, Casapu and Wells ask what it means to write about a city that is never entirely yours, yet becomes inseparable from your own biography. Who lived in our rooms before us? Whose histories do we inherit without knowing? And what remains of a place when its people, borders and political systems have changed? For one November evening, There Is No Past in Berlin invites the city's living and literary ghosts into the same room, to see what they still have to say to one another. THERE IS NOPAST IN BERLIN — Ioana Cristina Casapu in conversation with Alexander Wells 12 November 2026, 7 pm Lettrétage, Veteranenstraße 21, Berlin InEnglish. Admission by donation (recommended €5–10). ABOUT THE SERIES THERE IS NOPAST IN BERLIN is a literary and poetry project initiated by Ioana Cristina Casapu and Lars Jongeblod . Its pilot edition at Lettrétage brought together writers including Tom Bresemann, Anastasia Patsouri and Lars Jongeblod , establishing the curatorial basis for a recurring series on Berlin, literature, migration, memory and historical transformation. The project brings migrant, exiled and internally mobile writers into dialogue with authors born in Berlin. Each edition combines literary readings, moderated conversation and active audience participation, while foregrounding multilingualism and different aesthetic positions. Through these encounters, THERE IS NO PAST IN BERLIN develops new literary perspectives on the city and on the cultural narratives through which Berlin understands itself.
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