On 11 November, 2023 Werner Vogt died at the age of 85.In memoriam ORF broadcasts the “Portrait of a Man of Many Facets”:
FRIDAY, 8 December
Ö1 Hörbilder Spezial 10:05 – 11:00 a.m. + available for 7 days
A MAN WITH QUALITIES: WERNER VOGT
Radio Feature by Susanne Ayoub
ORF 2014 53’50“Werner Vogt first becomes a Jesuit teacher. Then he flees from the provinces to Vienna. Medical school is out of the question because the cadavers are too expenseive. Only when this misconception is overcome does nothing more stand in the way of this career choice. Except for he himself. “Conflicts are my form of love of neighbor,” he realizes, and he lives by this principle.
There was this counting-out rhyme: “South Tyrolers lead crooked lives, they cut your gut with crooked knives.” This saying is still ingrained deep in my memory, as I later realized that the contempt for Jews found a refuge in Tyrolean German. Why else would people call a cigarette butt they’re snuffing out a “Jew”? (Werner Vogt in an interview, 2014)
THONETSCHLÖSSL MÖDLING
Josef Deutsch-Platz 2, 2340 Mödling
LESUNG: Susanne Ayoub. Herbert Pauli. Moderation Sylvia Unterrader.
Susanne Ayoub will read from “Rondo Veneziano“:
“The novel is about three women, about growing older, and about solving a criminal case as therapy for ‘retirement shock.’ It is also a literary walk through Venice, its Armenian community, and the art of glass blowing.”
Sunday, NOVEMBER 12, 10:30 a.m.
RONDO VENEZIANO
Reading and Discussion
Susanne Ayoub (Author) and Christoph Winder (Journalist from “Der Standard“)
At a Sunday morning reading, culinary arts come before crime fiction—at the suggestion of the moderator Christoph Winder. And so the author reads about three hungry ladies and their first meal in Venice. In a restaurant with a warning posted at the entrance: “No pizza! No lasagne! No menu turistico!”
“Are we the only customers?” Biggi peered through the window. She was looking into the kitchen, where two men were at work. Behind the bar, a third man was putting glasses away. Nothing else was stirring.
Chris read the menu. “I don’t know any of these dishes. Oh, wait, baccalà manticato. Baccalà is dried cod. Not something I eat.” Adele took out her reading glasses. “Astice means lobster. Canestrelli are little scallops. They’re very tasty.”
“But the prices!” Chris narrowed her eyes. “Huh, and that’s just the appetizers, the main courses are even more expensive.”
Adele was getting angry. Maybe the prices were a little high, but they’d be getting authentic Italian cuisine!
“I have no problem with a tourist menu,” Chris said. “It’s just that you can afford something else. You probably have more sophisticated tastes, too.”
Biggi quickly intervened: “Hey now, let’s not turn this into an ideological debate!”
SONNTAG 8. October 5:04 – 6:00 p.m.
Saarlaendischer Rundfunk (SR)
The radio play “Cremation,” about Ingeborg Bachmann’s death in Rome, will be broadcast by Saarland Broadcasting on Sunday, October 8 – and then be available online for a considerable time. Unlike the shorter ORF version in the “Tonspuren” series, this radio feature contains many more original recordings of Ingeborg Bachmann, made only a few months before her death, as were these photographs.
“I have to admit, I no longer know why I’m living here. I have to admit, life here is like it is everywhere: someday someone will get married, someone will get a professorship, someone will hang themselves, end up in a mental hospital. Everything will be like everywhere. No Colosseum, no Capitol is going to help you get past it.”
(Ingeborg Bachmann)
Ingeborg Bachmann Rome, Café Greco, 1973. Photo Karl Kofler
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27
7:00 PM
Breitenseer Lichtspiele Cinema, Breitenseer Straße 21, 1140 Wien
READING – FILM – MUSIC
with Susanne Ayoub and Christl Greller and Stefan Reiser
Lesung von Susanne Ayoub, aus “Rondo Veneziano”:
A reading by Susanne Ayoub from “Rondo Veneziano”:
As a Jewish child, Pauline was forced to leave Vienna in 1938. After the war she returns to Europe. She is able to fulfill her dream of touring Italy’s artistic treasures. Her last stop is Venice. On the way from Padua to Venice, she meets Lauro, the son of a long-established Armenian family of glassmakers. It is love at first sight, and Pauline will never again leave Venice.
“Rondo Veneziano” is more than a mystery novel; it is also the tale of a unique city and the people who live there.
SUNDAY, JUNI, 11, 9:40 p.m. OE1 Kunstsonntag (Arts’ Sunday) New Texts:
“THE COMMISSION” is an interpretation of René Magritte’s Painting ‘La Mémoire’.
A quotation from story:
“The similitude, the most important criterium in portraiture, was there: the beautiful, regular features, the gentle, restrained gaze, the pensive mouth. And then it suddenly morphed into a girl’s face, and every correction only increased that impression. At the last sitting, David saw the bust before John could cover it up. ‘You’ve got to change that,’ he said. ‘My father wouldn’t like it.”
Translation of the OE1 Website: Fatal Rivalry “OE1 Art Stories”: “The Commission”. Susanne Ayoub on “La Mémoire” by René Magritte. Read by Petra Nagenkögel. Editor: Edith-Ulla Gasser 11 June 2023, 9:40 pm It is a mysterious motif from the Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte, which he executed in several variations. Magritte’s depiction of a sculptured head inspired the Viennese author Susanne Ayoub to write this “Ö1 Art Story,” in which she gives this art object a new provenance and interpretation.
Thursday, May, 11, 2023 7 p.m.
Tiempo Nuevo – ‘Delight’ – Bookstore Taborstrasse 17a 1020 Vienna
FREE ENTRY
Susanne Ayoub – Rondo Veneziano
A Mystery
About the novel:
The dentist Adele is a workaholic, while her two former schoolmates are suffering from acute retirement shock. The three meet by chance on a vaporetto in Venice and immediately get entangled in a criminal case: Adele’s wealthy honorary aunt, the art collector Pauline, has had an apparent fatal accident in her palazzo.
Pauline’s life story is what fascinates first in this book, but it is also about seemingly stolen art and a great deal of money. The background of this multilayered mystery comprises not only the lanes and squares of Venice, but also the glass blowers on Murano, the funerary island of San Michele, and the Armenian community in Venice with its customs and traditions.
Three friends from schooldays: Pharmacist Ilse, Writer Susanne, Lung Specialist Andrea
On the LITERADIO stage, author Susanne Ayoub and editor Herbert Gnauer will talk about a book that is more than just a mystery novel. To quote the author: “Rondo Veneziano is about three women, aging, and a criminal case as retirement-shock therapy.”
INVITATION TO THE BOOK LAUNCH
Wed. March 15, 7:00 pm
Buchhandlung Thalia
Mariahilferstraße 99
1060 Wien
Susanne Ayoub – Rondo Veneziano
A Mystery
About the novel:
The dentist Adele is a workaholic, while her two former schoolmates are suffering from acute retirement shock. The three meet by chance on a vaporetto in Venice and immediately get entangled in a criminal case: Adele’s wealthy honorary aunt, the art collector Pauline, has had an apparent fatal accident in her palazzo.
Pauline’s life story is what fascinates first in this book, but it is also about seemingly stolen art and a great deal of money. The background of this multilayered mystery comprises not only the lanes and squares of Venice, but also the glass blowers on Murano, the funerary island of San Michele, and the Armenian community in Venice with its customs and traditions.
Excerpt from Part 1, Pauline’s memories:
After our coffee, we strolled across St. Mark’s Square. Tourists were few and far between in 1945. Mostly there were art afficionados like me, or students, and quite a few painters. There were no queues outside St. Mark’s Cathedral and the campanile. We rode the elevator up to the observation platform. More than forty years earlier, the original tower had collapsed while a lift was being installed. “On July 14, 1902, at quarter to ten. On the anniversary of the French Revolution,” Lauro said. “To this day, conspiracy theorists believe there’s a connection.” While he was speaking, the bells in the tower started ringing. Five bronze bells hung in the campanile, which rang at various times of day or on special occasions. Morning, noon, and midnight were heralded by Nona; the end of the day by Renghiera, Mezza Terza and Trottiera. Maragona tolled for funerals. And in former times, when Malefico resounded, the Venetians knew that an execution was imminent.
Susanne Ayoub: „Antschel – A Film Essay about Paul Celan on his 100th Birthday“ (ORF -Austrian Broadcasting Corporation) Written in a spiral notebook with a fountain pen: “This one thing remained attainable, nearby, and unlost amidst all that was lost: language.” Then comes a photograph of a shop window sullied with anti-Semitic diatribes. This is one of the more concrete images in Susanne Ayoub’s film “Antschel,” which is a personal film in two respects. On the one hand, there are the recurring lines from various texts by Paul Celan, which a hand writes on paper, followed by associative scenes: beech forests, the doorways and streets of Czernowitz and Sadagora, views of landscapes and cityscapes. These scenes are interpretations of Celan’s poetic images, visualizations in which Susanne Ayoub’s own views of the poet and his work are palpable. And then there is the second personal level that Celan’s longtime friend 93-year-old Klaus Demus brings to the film by acting as a guide. Whatever concreteness is lacking in Susanne Ayoub’s filmic images is made up for by Demus’s accounts: sitting in his apartment, he tells of his reverence for his friend, whose outsized emotional vulnerability led to a breach between the two men. He tells of Celan’s paranoia and his suicide in the Seine. Demus shows photographs, letters, and books, and at one point he says, “If you ask what it really means, you haven’t understood the poetry.” This is a pivotal statement that can be applied to Ayoub’s film itself. Whoever wants to know the precise meaning of these images, which show much but explain nothing, might feel put off. “Antschel” is an artistic documentary in which the filmmaker’s formal rigor places demands on viewers while also allowing them time and space to absorb the effects of Celan’s language and Klaus Demus’s stories. The result is a tightly composed, poetic film that leaves many questions open while inviting us as viewers to read Celan again, to rediscover him for ourselves.
What I wish for—not much.
What to wish for after the
year of war?
Peace. Of course.
Peace, the hardest thing.
Peace at least
in my world
to make peace
at least
myself
with me
An evening of songs and a reading in the series of concerts and programs “Recreate. A Dreamival.”
“THE DIGNITY OF HUMANITY”
with Johannes Wohlgenannt
and Susanne Ayoub
Venue:
Rathaussaal
Rathausplatz 1
3970 Weitra
Susanne Ayoub will read from her poem cycle in progress, “In War.” For twenty years, the author, who was born in Baghdad, has been working on a multi-media, prize-winning Baghdad Project: film, audio play, short story, novel. As well as poetry. “In War” was begun long before the war in Ukraine and reflects on the wars and their impacts in country of her birth. The war in Europe has given some aspects of the work a new dimension and a frightening relevance.
with Gerti Drassl + Silvia Meisterle + Michael Dangl + Jörg Stelling
Sound engineering by Elmar Peinelt and Jakob Kainz
Edited by Elisabeth Stratka
A production of the ORF Feature Department, 2022
Photo by Michael HorowitzThe book cover of Lotte Profohs‘s magnum opus, the picture cycle “Erbarmt euch der Frauen“ (Take Pity on Women).
About the play The Viennese artist couple Lotte Profohs and Leherb, idolized and admired in the 1960s and 70s, established their success with performances that were scandlous at the time. Lotte’s international career began early when she invented Leherb and herself as fictional characters, remaining on the sidelines as an artist while being omnipresent as a muse and a model. It was a young love that lasted a lifetime, even if it was not a happy relationship. Lotte attempted suicide several times. In middle age she withdrew from public view. Leherb, on the other hand, continued to appear in baroque costumes trimmed with live mice and a stuffed pigeon, until he died in 1997 at age 64. Their drug-addicted son Anselm followed him four years later. Lotte Profohs outlived both of them, surrounded by her dove Arabella and the mice Paul and Pierre, until 2012.
A Congenial Collaboration Two jointly produced audio recordings present a special aspect of the couple’s congenial collaboration. Autodafé, a sort of surreal audio play with Boy Gobert as narrator, and Irre Gut (Insanely Good), with lyrics written and sung by both artists and musical arrangements by Toni Stricker, remain a revealing and refreshing listening experience to this day.
“Irre Gut” LP“Autodafé” LP
Gerti Drassl in front of Leherb’s controversial monumental work, the faience panels in the foyer of the old Vienna University of Economics.Silvia MeisterleAyoub in the studio with sound engineer Elmar PeineltMichael DanglJörg StellingSound engineer Elmar PeineltEditor Elisabeth Stratka
The radio play “Cremation,” about Ingeborg Bachmann’s death in Rome, will be broadcast by Bavarian Broadcasting on Sunday, August 21 – and then be available online for a considerable time. Unlike the shorter ORF version in the “Tonspuren” series, this radio feature contains many more original recordings of Ingeborg Bachmann, made only a few months before her death, as were these photographs.
The world I’m working on in words
is a fairy tale
over and over
I write the end
anew
The leitmotif of my story ‘Revolution,’ which appeared in the anthology ‘Die Welt, an der ich schreibe‘ (The World I’m Working on in Words), ed. Kurt Neumann, published by Sonderzahl, 2005.
THE MAUTHAUSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP
A documentary with excerpts from my film “Es war einmal in Mauthausen” (Once Upon a Time in Mauthausen).
Sunday May 15 at 12:37 p.m. ORF III
“I have to admit, I no longer know why I’m living here. I have to admit, life here is like it is everywhere: someday someone will get married, someone will get a professorship, someone will hang themselves, end up in a mental hospital. Everything will be like everywhere. No Colosseum, no Capitol is going to help you get past it.”
(Ingeborg Bachmann)
Ingeborg Bachmann Rome, Café Greco, 1973. Photo Karl Kofler
The name Käthe Leichter is associated with the golden age of Austrian Social Democracy. Few are still familiar with her life and work. Early on she was committed to improving the education and occupational situation of women. Her studies on women’s work in the First Republic are groundbreaking, and her analyses and demands are disturbingly relevant. In 1934, together with her husband, the journalist Otto Leichter, she founded the Revolutionary Socialists. In 1942, this Jewish resistance fighter was murdered by poison gas in the Bernburg/Saale concentration camp.
As a director he had a “strong hand.” As a political person he was alert and pugnacious. A man with courage and a backbone. Giving up was out of the question for him. I experience this close-up on one of his most important–most important especially to him–film projects. Without his tenacity, it would have failed because of financing. To say nothing of all the other kinds of resistance, including the film critics.
Reinhard wasn’t a simple person to deal with, but he was always fair and open, a rarity in that business. I am proud to be the screenwriter for the film “Hannah” (1996).
Friday, February 11, 2022, 21:55 o’clock.
Next on the program is Schwabenitzky’s film “Hannah” (21:55 o’clock) from 1996: The advertising executive Hannah (Elfi Eschke) has recently been hired by the toy company Hochstedt when she immediately falls in love with the junior partner Wolfgang (August Zirner). Out of sheer happiness, she does not suspect that she is unknowingly putting herself in danger, especially when she finds out that behind the harmless dolls and teddy bears the toy company is harboring a lethal secret.
The audiobook version of my first novel, “Angel’s Venom,” is available again, reissued by the Danish publishing house Saga Egmont (Copenhagen 2021).
Three excerpts:
Poverty is the pinch of shoes that are too tight because children’s feet grow so quickly. Poverty is being sick without medicine because the doctor’s fees are unaffordable.
Poverty is soup kitchen fare, a seat at a table in a charitable shelter where the needy sleep sitting up. They have no bed. Poverty is the glad feeling in frozen fingertips warming by a fire on a cold winter night. Poverty is a pauper’s grave.
Poverty is where romanticism has no home, only pain and dark rage against the others who have everything and keep it from you, as if you didn’t have the same right as they have to survive.
“As a young girl I liked to imagine what it would be like to be poor. Really poor, like in The Little Matchstick Girl, Hansel and Gretel, or The Star Money, freezing and hungry and all alone in the world,” Marie Horvath says. She can imagine the child with bare feet in oversized clogs, but not that this child owned no other shoes.
I rewind the thread of fate, from me back to Karoline, to her beginnings, which themselves are nothing but a continuation. Lotte Loew, at the window in the signalman’s hut, dreaming like the mute husband over his postage stamps, two disillusioned people at my mother’s cradle. They too deserve my attention, they too had their reasons, their motivations, they too carried on. The ball of blame is tossed backwards from generation to generation, until the trail gets lost in the past, in faceless ancestors. In the artfully fashioned mesh, interwoven by encounters and circumstances, torn, knotted, and patched, I seek out my story. And Marie Horvath, that child of her times, listens, intent yet impatient, because I distance myself farther and farther from what she calls the essence, the story, the scandal, from Karoline’s unimaginable transgression.
That Kritsch had taken Karoline in like a daughter of his own was no empty phrase. In the evening, behind locked doors, he made her dress in little girl’s clothes. He plaited her long hair into braids and hung a schoolbag on her back. Then he fumbled in her panties, growing aroused by her resistance, feigned or unfeigned. Everyone knew about it, no one cared about it. Karoline herself seemed content with her situation.
“He wanted to educate and raise her, to make her into a proper young woman who could move in his social circles, sit at our table as our coequal. But of course that was out of the question. We really thought that was going too far.”
“Get to the point, Herr Kritsch.” The examining magistrate rapped impatiently on the thick dossier on his desk. “Do you have anything to say that will help solve this crime? I have sent for the old autopsy report. Moritz Kritsch was seventy. High blood pressure, hardened arteries, overweight, cause of death brain stroke. The report leaves no doubt that your father died a natural death.”
“He had just taken out life insurance with her as the beneficiary! Doesn’t that sound familiar to you, Herr Councilor? And no one became suspicious in these cases, neither the aunt nor the lodger woman, isn’t that right?” Johann Kritsch leaned in conspiratorially toward the judge. “I know it wasn’t poison, that was settled clearly at the time. But she drove him to his death, she goaded him and provoked him until she blew out the flame of his life, just as if she had laid hands on him herself! That’s what a cold-blooded criminal she is!”
“Prepare yourself for the end,” the doctor said. That night, Karoline had hastily called him to her husband’s sickbed. “There is no more hope.” Karoline was still wearing the schoolgirl’s dress she’d put on for Kritsch, the short little skirt with the white lace panties under it that were open at the crotch, exposing her red pubic hair when she bent over. “You’re sick. The doctor says you need rest,” she’d protested. “Drink your bouillon, you promised you would, Kritsch.”
But he didn’t feel like soup, he felt the end approaching and clung to life with his last bit of strength. “Just once more, to make me happy. Do it for me, my love,” he begged, and so Karoline slipped reluctantly into the tight-fitting children’s clothes and showed him her backside. He reached between her white thighs, except this time it was no longer desire that made him pant and gasp, but death, which pressed on his heart with its broad, implacable hand. Karoline ran, dressed as she was, to get help, and in her fright she didn’t even notice the doctor’s leer. She knelt next to Kritsch’s bed and laid her head on his enfeebled hand.
“Don’t leave me, how can I live without you, come back, Kritsch, darling, my beloved husband!”
The doctor made a snide face at this performance. Like everyone else, he knew that Karoline was merely lying in wait for the old man to die. No one felt sorry for him, he was just reaping what he’d sown. Karoline’s extravagance, her greed for jewelry and clothes and furs, which grew with every year, would have ruined Kritsch if only he’d had enough time left.
Pain seized Karoline. It ran along her spine, pierced her muscles and tender fatty tissue, burrowed into the coils of her intestines, and eventually flooded her whole body. As this wave ebbed away, because the obstacle she was trying so violently to push into the light would not budge, she whimpered, weak and relieved. The stars twitched in the sky above her head. A dress rustled by her ear, a hand wiped the sweat from her brow. She smelled vinegar, which was supposed to refresh her temples, and disinfectant soap on the hand that pressed the sponge against her face. The blanket covering her tortured body was pulled off. She winced at the skillful fingers that were poking her, fumbling, probing. They awakened the pain that had been waiting for this moment and now bit into her flesh with a thousand teeth.
“No,” she cried. “Not again. I can’t take anymore!” But the great flood was already in her, breaking against the obstacle, straining and tearing at her. She heard a siren’s sound, strange and shrill, which broke off at its peak and sank back into a breathlessly strangling gurgle: her own voice. “Just breathe calmly. Deep breaths, in and out. Don’t cry, that will only sap your energy.”
Then there was no more breath, only a raging sun in her viscera, igniting a huge fire, scorching her, burning her up. The wave no longer pushed outward, it thrashed back and forth, setting the obstacle in motion, the great solar orb itself. The obstacle, the infernal agony, the child. Her son. Me.
Notice: The “2-G Rule” is in effect. This requires proof that you have been vaccinated or recovered. For a four-week transitional period, proof of a first vaccination plus a PCR test (within the past 48 hrs.) is also acceptable. The FFP2 mask requirement remains in effect.
A seat reservation (for contact tracing) is also required, with no exceptions. Tel. 01 5338159 or email: office@ogl.at Up to two reservations are allowed per person.
READING AND FILM
Paul Celan: ‘etwas ganz und gar Persönliches‘ – Die Briefe 1934-1970 (Something Entirely Personal” – Letters 1934-1970) (Selected, edited and annotated by Barbara Wiedemann/Suhrkamp)
“691 letters, 330 of them previously unpublished, to 252 recipients, reveal a wealth of previously unknown biographical facts, making it possible to define his poetology more precisely, as well as showing him in his everyday routine.” (Publisher’s note)
Following this, Susanne Ayoub will show her film “Antschel” (with Klaus Demus / Sound: Barbara Heller) and give a talk about Klaus Demus and Paul Celan.
Moderator: Manfred Müller In cooperation with the IWM (Institute for Human Sciences)
ANTSCHEL 45 Min. Original German Version. By Susanne Ayoub (Director+Screenplay+Camera). with Klaus Demus (narrator) and Katharina Knap (spoken word)
Translations exist in English, French, Ukrainian, and Romanian.
Paul Celan was from the Bukovina, “the former Habsburg province that has now fallen victim to the loss of history,” as he put it. He was born in 1920 in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) to a German-speaking Jewish family. The locales of his childhood no longer existed after the Nazi terror. His family was murdered, and he himself was persecuted and imprisoned in a work camp. He escaped death only by good fortune.
Paul Celan’s passport photo
“Antschel” deals with a homeland in language, the language that was Paul Celan’s only place of refuge.
“There was this one thing amidst the losses that remained attainable, nearby, not lost: language.”
The film is a “landscape film.” City views—pictures from the past—turn up again in present-day Czernowitz. A trip to Sadagora, where Celan’s mother was from, leads to the synagogue and the Jewish cemetery. Celan’s path through postwar Vienna. His identity card as a Jewish refugee.
“I didn’t stay long. I didn’t find what I had hoped to find.”
Susanne Ayoub with Klaus Demus
They drank dry the eyes of the seeing – from “The Jugs”
It is a landscape film in another sense as well: it visually interprets linguistic images from Celan’s poems.
“Think of me as someone you want to need, as I think of you, Paul, with all my might. – Yours, Klaus”
The narrator of the film is Klaus Demus, now 93 years old.
Demus met Celan through Ingeborg Bachmann in Vienna and stayed connected to him for a lifetime.
Dedication to “Klaus, my brother”
“The only way you can understand poetry is poetically. If you ask what it really means, you haven’t understood what poetry is. Because what it really means is probably ineffable.
Le Pont Mirabeau
In 1970, after years of serious mental crises, Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.
Nearly twenty years have passed since my first return to Iraq, the “Reunion with a Memory,” and the beginnings of my multimedia Baghdad Project. In the meantime this project has assumed a variety of forms. I presented some aspects of it in Geneva, along with excerpts from the Baghdad Fragments, the audio play, and the film.
Women in long dresses
tightly laced
men with
tall hats
monocle and
choking collars
standing in front
of coaches fountains
garden bowers
velvet curtains
imitation garlands
captured in sepia
for ever
so strange to the child
the little hands leaf
through the pages
the mother points here and there
that was my aunt
her sons only
one daughter
look grandpa and grandma
and that girl there looks like
you
they all live nowhere
but in this book
it fills up gradually
the child has long been
a child no more
but remains a child
for one person
until the final
day
now she is
in the family album
the child also grown
old
inserts
the last photo
MIXED DOUBLES A radio play on Southwest Broadcasting (SWR)
A mystery on SWR 4: “Mixed Doubles” won bronze at the Zons Radio Play Festival in 2014.
Produced as a “dialect mystery” because Germans consider Austrian German a dialect.
Dunja comes home and finds her lover Oliver dead in the living room. A silver stiletto, a souvenir from Spain turned murder weapon, is stuck in his back. Dunja desperately calls up her husband Jo, who is on a business trip in the Netherlands. It turns out that he was well aware of Dunja’s unfaithfulness. He is not very surprised by his rival’s death. Then the doorbell rings. Oliver’s wife Melly is at the door.
Helene Ayoub had a long life, a long illness and a long death. She was a brave woman, even daring in her youth, and did not shy away from any adventure. She followed her love for my father Karim to Iraq. There, she experienced and survived three revolutions before she escaped back to her homeland. She loved her freedom and her independence more than anything, and yet had to endure being completely dependent on outside help due to her illness. She never complained. She was the most uncompromising person you can imagine, which didn’t always make dealing with her easy. She didn’t know about pretense. Her dream to become a singer did not come true, but the memory of her melodious voice and the songs she sang for us will remain. Also, her cleverness, her wit, her inner strength. Rest in peace, dear Mama.
As a farewell, a reminder to listen, a scene out of the audio book ‘Born in Baghdad. Meeting Memory’:
(in German
Black image. No memory. Speechless. Repressed. Forgotten. The child has no past. Life is here, in Vienna. I have no roots. I have no homeland. Gray mixes with the black. Half-light. Slowly it grows brighter. The contours of a living room begin to emerge. A photograph on the wall gradually becomes visible. A couple. An old black-and-white picture, yellowed, yellowish paper. A bridal couple. My parents. My mother was married in black.
The final presentation of this film this year is not an online screening, but an event at the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv, in cooperaton with the Austrian Cultural Forum Kyiv:
Thursday, December 3, 2020, 7 p.m.
The program includes a discussion of Paul Celan’s life and work as well as poetry readings by the leading Ukrainian authors Serhij Zhadan and Kateryna Kalytko. The discussion will be moderated by Evgenia Lopata, the curator of a series of Celan projects in Ukraine and abroad.
On the program there is also a screening of the documentary film “Antschel,” shot in 2020 by the Austrian director and poet Susanne Ayoub, with the participation of Celan’s close friend, the Austrian art historian Klaus Demus.
The gingko tree drops its leaves
on a single day
the squirrel retrieves the nut that
lay hidden there
in Shatzel Hall
the raccoon sits chagrined
beneath the bench
where the last Mohicans
smoked their peace pipes
one long summer long
deep in the sky hangs a birdsong
a melody called past and gone
winter is coming
we will not meet again
and next spring
nothing will be as it was
the year brings only newness
that’s a lovely song (Ohio 2008)
The original title of my article was “Tiefsee einer Seele” (Deep Sea of a Soul), after a quotation from Celan’s first book, “Der Traum vom Traume” (The Dream of the Dream).
Paul Celan in Vienna: “I didn’t stay long. I didn’t find what I had hoped to find.” Still, he left an indelible trace in Vienna.
45 Min. Original German Version.
By Susanne Ayoub (Director+Screenplay+Camera).
with Klaus Demus (narrator)
and Katharina Knap (spoken word).
Translations exist in English, French, Ukrainian, and Romanian
Paul Celan was from the Bukovina, “the former Habsburg province that has now fallen victim to the loss of history,” as he put it. He was born in 1920 in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) to a German-speaking Jewish family. The locales of his childhood no longer existed after the Nazi terror. His family was murdered, and he himself was persecuted and imprisoned in a work camp. He escaped death only by good fortune.
“There was this one thing amidst the losses that remained attainable, nearby, not lost: language.”
Paul Celan’s passport photo
“Antschel” deals with a homeland in language, the language that was Paul Celan’s only place of refuge. The film is a “landscape film.” City views—pictures from the past—turn up again in present-day Czernowitz. A trip to Sadagora, where Celan’s mother was from, leads to the synagogue and the Jewish cemetery. Celan’s path through postwar Vienna. His identity card as a Jewish refugee.
“I didn’t stay long. I didn’t find what I had hoped to find.”
Susanne Ayoub with Klaus DemuslThey drank dry the eyes of the seeing – from “The Jugs”It is a landscape film in another sense as well: it visually interprets linguistic images from Celan’s poems.
The narrator of the film is Klaus Demus, now 93 years old. He met Celan through Ingeborg Bachmann in Vienna and stayed connected to him for a lifetime.
“Think of me as someone you want to need, as I think of you, Paul, with all my might. – Yours, Klaus”
Dedication to „Klaus , my brother.“
“The only way you can understand poetry is poetically. If you ask what it really means, you haven’t understood what poetry is. Because what it really means is probably ineffable.”
Le Pont Mirabeau
In 1970, after years of serious mental crises, Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.
Presented by the German World Service Cologne as part of the series “Blue Crime” on Saturday August 29, 2020 at 12:05 a.m. (available for 7 additional days)
MARIE. A Case. By Susanne Ayoub Featuring Gerti Drassl, Stefano Bernardin
Markus Meyer, Wolfgang Hübsch
Andreas Patton and Ulli Maier Director: Eva Garthe Production: ORF 2011 Length: 52’21”
Translation Geoffrey Howes
In her audio drama “Marie. A Case,” Susanne Ayoub tells a true story from the year 1905, quoting from original documents, court records, testimony, press reports, and letters. The character’s names, like the letter from Marie that frames and runs through this audio drama, are fictional. Marie Lerch, the well brought-up twenty-one-year-old daughter of a mayor, has a secret relationship with the dubious merchant’s assistant Wolf Hauser. But her parents urge her to get engaged to the respected but lackluster law clerk Neumann. Seeing her parents’ marriage as a bad example, Marie tries to find a way out of her dilemma. She poisons Neumann with cyanide and—just to be doubly certain—shoots him in the mouth with a stolen revolver. In his expert report, the resident physician attests that “she possesses a far greater than average education.” However, the accused seems to “lack a sense of shame and honor, and embodies loose ideas about the nature of the law.” In court, Marie Lerch serves up fabricated stories and gets tangled up in contradictions. She is ultimately sentenced to death by guillotine. Over a thousand spectators flock to her execution.
Alone in the dark eyes shut a gray glow I don’t see but I do see the shape made of gray it is a woman she’s lost her husband she’s lost her son sisters and brothers lost neighbors and friends I want to get away then he nears he has no hands no legs he has no feet no arms no more eyes he finds no ears he is so near I can smell the rot I cannot get away the third one has only one voice I’m lying on my back he says hands folded on his chest hands tainted with blood I’m coming home with all honors shrouded in the stuff of my homeland of the flag I want to wake up it’s not a dream
MARIE. A Case. An Audio Drama by Susanne Ayoub North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR) Saturday, 8 August, 2020 9:05 pm – 10:00 pm (+ recording accessible for 7 days)
This audio drama tells a true crime story, quoting from original documents, court records, expert opinions, newspaper reports, and letters. The names of the characters are fictitious, as is “Marie’s letter,” which frames and runs through the play.
Translation Geoffrey Howes
Scene 14. Courtroom.
Presiding Judge But you did meet again with Hauser in the meantime?
Marie I said I fell down. But he didn’t believe me. My father was afraid he’d report us to the police.
Presiding Judge So your father also knew about the abortion?
Marie I’d told him that if I have to marry the law clerk, I’ll kill myself. My father wanted to help me. But then Hauser threatened to make the abortion public. I acquired a revolver, one that would make as little noise as possible.
Presiding Judge How did you get a hold of the weapon? That’s no piece of cake.
Marie The revolver had belonged to a man who committed suicide. My father, who was the mayor, had brought it home from the town hall and put it away in a case, which I took.
Presiding Judge You did not kill yourself with it, but used money to silence your boyfriend.
Marie Yes, he always needed money, and I always had enough to provide it again and again. That’s why I said yes when the law clerk asked me for my hand once again. But then I was sorry I’d done it.
Klaus Demus, Paul Celan’s friend since youth, and himself a poet:
“The only way you can understand poetry is poetically. If you ask what it really means, you haven’t understood what poetry is. Because what it really means is probably ineffable.”
A quotation from a letter of Paul Celan’s: “Poems are alos gifts—gifts to those who are paying attention.
The film’s narrator is Paul Celan’s friend from youth, Klaus Demus. The two young poets met in Vienna in 1948.
Passfoto Paul Celan
Klaus Demus in an interview:
I was an art historian by profession, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I identified pictures that were in storage without titles, collected over centuries, and I named over fifty artists. And I found out everything about the paintings that was needed for the catalogs I published.
Ayoub interviewing Klaus Demus
That was my second passion. I am not an artist. I was interested in visual arts, especially the art of my own era, and for a time I looked at and pursued poetry merely as an amateur. Only later did I recognize it as a calling. In that phase of awareness of my actual existence, I met Paul Celan.
SUNDAY MAY 10, 2020 starting at 9:20 a.m. The Mauthausen Concentration Camp A documentation in four parts on the history of the largest concentration camp in Austria
with excerpts from my film
ONCE UPON A TIME IN MAUTHAUSEN
On April 19, 1970, Paul Celan left his apartment on Avenue Émile Zola where he had lived alone for the past two years, near the Mirabeau Bridge over the Seine. He never returned.
“IT IS TIME FOR IT TO BE TIME” Susanne Ayoub on Paul Celan
on the 50th anniversary of his death
Der Standard/ ALBUM. April 18-19, 2020
ORF Radio – Ö1 in the series “HÖRBILDER” (Audio Images), Saturday April 18, 2020, 9:05 a.m. (available for 7 additional days at https://oe1.orf.at)
with Gerti Drassl, Silvia Meisterle, Johanna Tomek, Karl Menrad, Wolfgang Rupert Muhr, Klaus Uhlich, Aimie Rehburg, and guest appearances by Markus Hering and Floran Teichtmeister. Directed by Susanne Ayoub. Sound by Robert Pavlecka. Edited by Elisabeth Stratka.
1919: One hundred and one years ago, Austrian women could vote for the first time. The path leading there had been long and rough. Susanne Ayoub presents portraits of two of the steadfast champions of a woman’s right to vote in her audio piece “Bread and Roses”: the middle-class writer Rosa Mayreder fought for the education and social recognition of women; the Social Democratic politician Adelheid Popp represented the interests of working women, especially the demand that to this day has not been met: equal pay for equal work.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN MAUTHAUSEN. 60‘. A Trio Art Team Production 2010
in Coop with United Alien TV 2010/2012. Premiere Jewish Film Festival Vienna 2012
How does one live in Mauthausen nowadays?
Writer and Director Susanne Ayoub has talked to the people in Mauthausen? How do the handle the past of this place. Mauthausen, a contemplative little town in Upper Austria with an baroque riverside that gives a quite idyllic impression. But in our collective memory this place is mainly connected with the NS-regime and the terror oft he concentration camp.
(quotation from the newspaper The Standard, Vienna, 11/18/2011
MAY IN MAUTHAUSEN. Short Film, 14 Minutes. A Trio Art Team Production 2008.
The scene of the film is in the former concentration camp Mauthausen. Inside the memorial museum at Mauthausen an opening of a new exhibition is taking place. There are speeches, a buffet and wine. Outside the museum lies the abandoned camp. The spirit of the ‘angel of noon’ wanders through this darkness.
The poem The Angel of Noon, which was written by Jean Cayrol while he was imprisoned in Mauthausen, accompanies the film.May in Mauthausen poses the question of how to remember, how commemoration is possible.
The images, which accompany the angel of noon on his meanderings through the camp, convey, more than his words can, the horror, which does not go away.
My angel if you watch My angel if you watch over me I’ll listen in the dark no breath just fear I that heavy hour before twilight ghostly yesterdays revenge retribution black thoughts in a round dance My angel you help me get beyond if you sleep I am lost if your wing protects me I will find morning find my way to the light
IN WAR. A Poetic Cycle by Susanne Ayoub.
In progress.
Down by the river freshness greens all that grows the fish swim close to the bank evenings the deer stand at forest’s edge those down there how well they live
with water and meadow sun and woods all that’s left for us is drought and cold and stone Yet from injustice a sharp weapon can be forged
the valley begins at the mountain we will join those down there and take the light and warmth the full stomachs the contentment we’ll take the peace they didn’t share with us no one will possess it
IN WAR. A poetic cycle by Susanne Ayoub.
In progress.
*5500 years ago, during the first known war of humankind, the city of Hamoukar, near the present-day border of Iraq and Syria, was obliterated.
Literaturzentrum Alte Schmiede
Schönlaterngasse 9
1010 Wien
Alte Schmiede
with Susanne Ayoub, author, director, and filmmaker
und Stefan Weppelmann, art historian, Director of the gallery of paintings at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna
Moderator: Andreas Jungwirth
“The Caravaggio Mystery” by Susanne Ayoub begins on a stormy night in Palermo in October 1969. The altarpiece of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo depicting Christ’s birth, painted by Caravaggio, has disappeared.
The stolen Caravaggio: La Natività
The search for the famous painting is as dramatic as the life of the brilliant painter, whose temperament made him into a murderer. But after even fifty years of countless clues, false confessions, and spine-tingling legends, the theft remains unsolved. Only one thing is certain: it was the Mafia.
Stefan Weppelmann – Susanne Ayoub – Andreas Jungwirth
Weppelmann: “There is no absolute way to keep art from being stolen – except for the depository.“
The author’s alter ego in the drama: the actress Katharina Knap
The Radiophonic Workshop at the Alte Schmiede presents the audio drama, followed by discussion.
with Michael Dangl, Markus Hering, Sarah Jung, Katharina Knap, Karl Menrad and Raphael Sas. Thanks go out to Maria Teresa Galluzzo and Giuseppe Ricciardo. Directed by Susanne Ayoub – Engineered by Robert Pavlecka und Anna Kuncio – Edited by Elisabeth Stratka
An ORF production in cooperation with WDR (West German Broadcasting) 2019
The stolen Caravaggio: La Natività
An angel falls from heaven. The baby is lying on the bare floor. His mother sits before him. She seems weak, weary, resigned to her fate. The men stand around her. All of them are looking at the child, and even the ox pushes forward. Only the man at her side does not look at the baby, he turns away, questioning? The woman is young. The man at her side seems much older. His hair is nearly white. Or is this an effect of the light falling on him from above? Caravaggio’s famous light. He introduced this radiance to the art of painting. La Luce del Vero, the light of truth. Mann an ihrer Seite sieht es nicht an, er wendet sich um, fragend?
Caravaggio´s portrait as decapitated Goliath
“The Caravaggio Mystery” begins on a stormy night in Palermo in October 1969. The altarpiece of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo depicting Christ’s birth, painted by Caravaggio, has disappeared. Like the famous chiaroscuro technique in his painting, Carravaggio’s life was marked by light and shadow, and so this brazen art theft fits the artist’s dramatic biography.
Ayoub’s drama combines the story of the theft and the subsequent intensive and often dramatic investigation in the crime with scenes from Caravaggio’s life, his years on the run as a murderer fleeing from the papal ban, until shortly before his death in Sicily, when he paints one of his most moving pictures: the Natività.
Fontana Pretoria
Is it hanging in the living room of a secret art lover? Was it buried with a Mafia boss? According to the Sicilian Mafia expert Maria Teresa Galluzzo, who guides us through the play, only one thing is certain: the Mafia organized the theft. No one else could have carried it out so boldly and flawlessly.
The house before her had a single story and three tall chimneys with smoke rising from them. She came closer until she could read the sign on the façade: Josef Lang Bakery. Entrance just around the corner. The finger pictured below this pointed the direction. Founded 1830.
The bakery door opened. A tall man came out, glanced quickly at her, and turned away again. She tried to speak to him, but she couldn’t get a word out. Another gust of wind caught her from behind, driving patches of fog ahead of it. The man disappeared in the billowing whiteness. She ran across the road and continued until she could make out his black coat up ahead of her. With his head bowed down, he hurried away. There were only a few steps between her and her house when her eyes lit on a bright red spot, right by the curb. She bent down and found the lost playing card. The queen of hearts was in the company of the jack of spades. She called out after him. This time her voice was clear, but it was drowned out by a passing car. Steel-spoked wheels jolted over the old cobblestones. She drew the key from her coat pocket and was going to unlock the front door when she bumped into rough stone. There was no door there. There was no house.
As part of the Podium Summer Reading Series “Distant Mirrors—Literature and History,” Susanne Ayoub will read from her novella “Die Fassade” (The Façade). The text is a further stage of her contribution to the artistic dictionary of architecture Sprache der Straße (Language of the Street), edited by Mark Gilbert, Hans Hinterholzer and Wolfgang Niederwieser, and published by Sonderzahl in 2005.
BUCHHANDLUNG THALIA
Landstraße Hauptstraße 2A, 1030 Wien
SATURDAY MARCH 16, 2019, 3:00 p.m.
With her audio drama “Brot und Rosen” (Bread and Roses; ORF 2019), Susanne Ayoub looks at the beginnings of the women’s movement in Europe, tracing an arc from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution. She will quote and read from the writings of revolutionary women, suffragettes, and women who fought against sexual double standards.
Rosa Mayreder
Rosa Mayreder 1878-1938 Author Throughout the history of human development, women appear in a strange twilight: now superhuman, now subhuman; half divine or half diabolical; as a prophetess and Sibyl endowed with the ability to work miracles, or as a witch and sorceress possessing demonic powers. Oppression to the point of slavery and glorification to the point of worship.
Ottilie Baader 1847-1925
Homeworker, Social Democrat When I was working, a small clock stood in front of me, and meticulous care was taken that this dozen collars did not take any longer than the last dozen, and nothing could make you happier than saving a couple of minutes. And as the years passed by you didn’t realize you were young and that life hadn’t given you a single thing.
Olympe de Gouges
Olympe de Gouges, 1748-1793
Writer and Activist during the French Revolution Preposterous, conceited, scientifically bombastic, and degenerate, the men in this century of Enlightenment and ingenuity, from a position of the coarsest ignorance, are trying to rule despotically over a gender that possesses every possible intellectual capacity..
Suffragette Lady Florence Norman 1916
Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759-1797
Author How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!
Force feeding of English suffragettes in prison.
Alexandra Michailowna Kollontai
Alexandra Kollontai, 1872-1952
People’s Commissar during the October Revolution, the first female cabinet minister and later the first female diplomat of the Soviet Union Because they are lonely, people tend delude themselves in a predatory and unhealthy manner that they will find a soulmate of the opposite sex. They see cunning eros as the only power that can dispel the darkness of loneliness, even if only for a while.
Helene Stöcker 1869-1943
Sexual ethicist Let us recall this statement: “The father is not related to his illegitimate child.” Who could have ever come up with this monstrous mockery of all natural and honorable feelings?
*Suffragettes demonstrating in London, 1910
Reading Buchhandlung Thalia Landstraße. Foto Johanna Grabner
About the Russian Revolution, free love instead of the the des bourgeoise ideal of everlasting marriage. Foto Johanna Grabner.
Susanne Ayoub’s new audio play marking 100 years of women’s suffrage
Premiere broadcast ORF Radio – in the series “HÖRBILDER” (Audio Images) Saturday, February 15, 2019 9:05 a.m. (+ available for 7 days on https://oe1.orf.at)
with Gerti Drassl, Silvia Meisterle, Johanna Tomek, Karl Menrad, Wolfgang Rupert Muhr, Klaus Uhlich, and Aimie Rehburg, with guest appearances by Markus Hering und Floran Teichtmeister Directed by Susanne Ayoub; Sound by Robert Pavlecka; Edited by Elisabeth Stratka
One hundred and one years ago, Austrian women could vote for the first time. The path leading to this had been long and rough. Susanne Ayoub presents portraits of two of the steadfast champions of a woman’s right to vote in her audio piece “Bread and Roses”: the middle-class writer Rosa Mayreder fought for the education and social recognition of women; the Social Democratic politician Adelheid Popp represented the interests of working women, especially the demand that to this day has not been met: equal pay for equal work.
Still gripping. And unfortunately just as timely as when it first came out:
February 8, 2019, 8:15 p.m. Repeated
HANNAH (1996)
with Elfi Eschke and August Zirner
Book by Susanne Ayoub
Directed by Reinhard Schwabenitzky
Hannah, an advertising executive, falls in love with her boss without knowing that she is putting her life in danger. It turns out his toy company produces more than just dolls.
DECEMBER 17, 2018 6:00 p.m. Arbeiterkammer Wien -Bibliothek
Prinz Eugen-Straße 20-22
1040 Wien
On December 18 it will be exactly one hundred years since the constitutive National Assembly adopted electoral rules including the general right to vote for women.
A milestone for equal rights for women that was achieved only by the resolute demands and struggles of many women that lasted many decades.
In her play “Bread and Roses,” Susanne Ayoub portrays two important activists in the Austrian women’s movement who are representative of many others: the middle-class writer Rosa Mayreder, who fought for the education and social recognition of women, and the Social Democratic politician Adelheid Popp represented the interests of working women, especially the demand that to this day has not been met: equal pay for equal work.
The play describes the very different fates of the two women as well as their social and political milieus.
After the play, the significance of the right to vote will be examined in a panel discussion with the historian Johanna Gehmacher and the migration researcher Bernhard Perchinig. Johanna Gehmacher will illuminate the historical importance of the introduction of women’s right to vote. Bernhard Perchinig will take a look at those who have no right to vote in our times. Who is affected, and what does it mean for immigrants, particularly for women?
Rosa Mayreder on the 500 schilling bill, 1997
Participants:
Susanne Ayoub, born in 1956 in Baghdad, is an author and director.
Johanna Tomek, actor, longtime principal cast member and radio voice, lives in Burgenland and Vienna. SHE WILL STAND IN FOR DORIS MAYER, WHO PASSED AWAY ON DECEMBER 6.
As part of Litera-Tour 2018, Susanne Ayoub will read excerpts from “Views,” dialogues created in association with Dieter Kleinpeter’s picture cycle “strand:identitäten” (beach:identities).
* Millions of Barrels of Oil: Protest sign at a demonstration in the oil-rich, bitterly poor south of Iraq: “2,500,000 barrels per day; $70 per barrel; 2,500,000 × 70 = 0. Sorry, Pythagoras: we’re in Basra”
IN WAR. A poetic cycle by Susanne Ayoub. In progress. Translation Geoffrey C. Howes
“Woman: Superhuman? Subhuman? Half divine or half diabolical? Prophetess? Witch and sorceress? Oppression to the point of slavery and glorification to the point of worship.” (Rosa Mayreder)
MONDAY NOVEMBER 12, 7 PM
THEATER L.E.O. Ungargasse 18
1030 Wien
BREAD AND ROSES
The long march to women’s suffrage
and its unswerving advocates Rosa Mayreder and Adelheid Popp
Assembled from original quotations and staged by Susanne Ayoub
Readers Theater
with
Doris Mayer as Rosa Mayreder
Susanne Ayoub as Adelheid Popp
Music by Maren Rahmann
On the occasion of International Women’s Day and 100 years of women’s right to vote, the Landstrasse Women’s Caucus of the Social Democratic Party is showing the feature film “Divine Order” (CH 2017), about the introduction of the right to vote for women in Switzerland in 1971.
Introductory Talk by
Susanne Ayoub + Barbara Marx
Moderation Saya Ahmad
Women decide. Women get involved. Women organize. We women bring power to culture, economics, work, politics, and volunteer work. We want to make this more visible, and network powerful women from different spheres with each other.
Susanne Ayoub was invited to the international Gerard Manley Hopkins Poetry Festival in Kildare, Ireland
21 – 28 July, 2017
Susanne Ayoub reads from the books of poetry SPRICHST DU MIT MIR / You talking to Me and LIEBE / Love. On Fulfilled, Unrequited, and Faded Love.
Nedra Bickham reads the translations into American English by Geoffrey Howes (in collaboration with Nedra Bickham)
Bridle, a drawing by Rima Al-Juburi
YOUR ELEMENTS
Your eyes’ nightvelvet
moonskin mild
firetongue
breathless storm
resting
in the shade of your lashes
aus dem Amerikanischen Geoffrey Howes
Rivers of Babylon, Watercolor by Rima Al-Jubur
Your Elements
The velvet of your eyes
As tender as the moon
tongue of fire
breathless storm
suspension
in the shadow of your lashes
aus dem Amerikanischen Nedra Bickham
A short poem from the book SPRICHST DU MIT MIR / You Talking to Me, but Geoffrey Howes’s and Nedra Bickham’s translations, both created in collaboration with the author, differ significantly.
The pictures by Rima Al-Juburi are reproduced in the book.
I ask you Moon
what can be done
about my homeless
love
I ask you Moon
you wander through
the sky above
tell me
what happened
His heart was full
of love as mine
I ask you Moon
what happened to us
What can be done
his heart is lost
Moon tell me
where love has gone
Homeless Love Song
Ich frag den Mond
der über meinem Himmel wohnt
was ist geschehn
er weiß es
hat uns zugesehn
beim Auf und Untergehen
was kann ich tun
ich geh mit dir
hab ich versprochen
was immer kommt
wo ist sie nun
werd ich sie wiedersehen
werd ich erfahren
das Warum
Moon Tell me is a lyric. The poem Homeless Love Song has been published in the volume of poetry ‘Sprichst du mit mir’.
Film screening 1 hr. 10 min.
with a discussion about the genesis of the radio feature about the film.
The author and filmmaker Susanne Ayoubpresents her film Alma’s Little Photographer about the last contemporary witness who knew Alma Mahler-Werfel and her family personally.
Susanne Ayoub interviewing Erich Rietenauer
Seven of Erich Rietenauer’s 90 years were so extraordinary that they determined the course of the rest of his life. As a small boy from impoverished circumstances at a Christmas party given by the politician Julius Tandler, he was suddenly face-to-face with a lady from high society. He never forgot her eyes of “steel blue,” her fragrance, or her embrace. Her name was Alma Mahler-Werfel.
ALMAS KLEINER FOTOGRAF / Alma’s Little Photographer – with Erich Rietenauer – Regina Liane Löw, camera and editing –Herbert Gnauer, sound – Susanne Ayoub, script and direction – A production of the Trio Art Team in cooperation with ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation), 2016
Erich Rietenauer’s archive – photo by Regina Liane Löw
A Reading in the Laxenburg Public Library & Media Library Wednesday March 22, 2017
The Laxenburg Public Library & Media Library invites you to a reading by the author Susanne Ayoub from her novel “The Jewel Garden”.
The event begins at 7:00 p.m. at Wiener Straße 2a.
A FAMILY DRAMA WITH the feel of a thriller
For Laura, Christmas Eve 1955 begins like so many others, with discord in the family home. But then an unexpected visitor shows up: Younis, a young man from Baghdad. And all at once everything changes. Before the year is out, Laura and Younis are a couple. Laura leaves Vienna, her parents, and her friends, and follows Younis to Baghdad.
In the Garden of the Gods in the epic of Gilgamesh, the trees, leaves, and fruits are made of precious stones. There are no thorns, only crystals; no darkness, only sunshine. For Laura, the path into her new life seems as fabulous as this vision. The world of the Near East with its colors, fragrances, and sounds immediately draws her under its spell. But beyond the magnificent mansions of Baghdad, where the affluent live in isolation, this idyll comes to an end. The assassination of the royal family topples the Iraqi monarchy. Alone at home with her small child, Laura experiences the outbreak of civil war. Nothing remains as it was. Younis too becomes a different person. He leads a second life that Laura is not allowed to know about. She realizes she has married a stranger.
View of Baghdad by Rima Al-Juburi
Susanne Ayoub tells the story of a brave young woman’s attempt to gain access to a foreign culture, of differing worldviews and social norms. She describes the high and low points of a marriage and sheds light on the background of a politically dramatic time, from the assassination of the Hashemite royal family to the revolutions and civil wars that followed.
“An echo of styles and motifs, permutated, reduced, perpetuated. Addressing and expressing, each in its own form. Mirror images of assertiveness and fragility.”(Christine Huber on Sprichst du mit mir/ You Talking to Me)
The Citiy, drawing by Rima Al Juburi
“immersed in words and images in silence in the empty space amidst and between an encounter in the search for clues including the search for own’s own self in notes that report on a back then and a back there on being here and now on something that is and something that isn’t or is no longer or because that is altogether unattainable”
(Peter Paul Wiplinger Notes on a Book of Poetry by Susanne Ayoub)
The Austrian-Iraqi author, journalist, and filmmaker Susanne Ayoub will read from her latest novel “The Jewel Garden” (Verlag LangenMüller Munich 2016) at the 12th Literary Salon, presented by the Austrian Consulate General on January 12, 2017.
The novel describes a love between two cultures against the political background of Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s, the fall of the monarchy, and the subsequent civil war. This is the time into which the author was born. During the reading, the author will also briefly outline her multimedia project “Baghdad Fragments.”
Due to limited space, we kindly ask you to register for the event by January 8, 2017. Tel.: 089 99 815-20 or email: muenchen-gk@bmeia.gv.at
Friday November 11, 2016 1:00 p.m. Discussion and reading
Der Edelsteingarten / The Jewel Garden
Laura and Younis meet on Christmas Eve of 1955. On New Year’s Eve they are already a couple. Despite all warnings, the woman from Vienna follows the Iraqi to his native city. A migration from bleak postwar Vienna to the flourishing metropolis of Baghdad. But beyond the villas of the affluent, the idyll comes to an end. A bloody assassination of members of the royal family topples the monarchy. Revolution and civil war are the result. Nothing remains as it was. Younis too becomes a different man. Laura realizes she has married a stranger.
THURSDAY OKTOBER 13, 2016 7:30 P.M.
Alte Seifenfabrik Lauterach/
Old Soap Factory, Lauterach
12 EUR, register at 05574 680217
After the successful opening of the Conversation Culture Series with Dr. Hannes Androsch, Conversation Culture in Lauterbach will continue in October.
This time we will be welcoming Susanne Ayoub. She will read from her book “Der Edelsteingarten” (The Jewel Garden), show excerpts from the film, and then engage in conversation with Dr. Franz Josef Köb.
Susanne Ayoub is an Austrian-Iraqi author, journalist, and filmmaker. The story of “The Jewel Garden” is based on the life stories of Susanne Ayoub’s parents. The novel takes place in Baghdad and Vienna, and the protagonists move in the area of tension between two different cultures and religions.
Susanne Ayoub was born in Baghdad. At the age of six she fled with her mother to Vienna, went to a Catholic boarding school, and later, at her father’s wish, she converted to the Islamic faith. Today Susanne Ayoub lives in Vienna. She has been awarded many prizes for her works.
Become part of a great family story that confronts the question of how foreign, or how at home, one is in a particular country, and what it feels like to live between two cultures and religions. A topic that will probably never lose its relevance, especially in our times.
The Conversation Culture Series is a cooperation between the market town of Lauterbach and the “Ländlebuch” bookstore.
In the Garden of the Gods in the epic of Gilgamesh, the trees, leaves, and fruits are made of precious stones. There are no thorns, only crystals; no darkness, only sunshine. For Laura, the path into her new life seems as fabulous as this vision. The world of the Near East with its colors, fragrances, and sounds immediately draws her under its spell. But beyond the magnificent mansions of Baghdad, where the affluent live in isolation, this idyll comes to an end. The assassination of the royal family topples the Iraqi monarchy. Alone at home with her small child, Laura experiences the outbreak of civil war. Nothing remains as it was. Younis too becomes a different person. He leads a second life that Laura is not allowed to know about. She realizes she has married a stranger.
A ”family drama with the feel of a thriller.”
”Killing alone is not enough.”
(Peter Pisa in “Kurier“)
Literature at the Movie Theater: In the Vierzigerhof, Langenlois
WEDNESDAY SEPT. 28., 7 P.M.
A reading from “The Jewel Garden”
and the film
“Baghdad Fragments”
BAGHDAD FRAGMENTS
Film essay (42 min.), UA Diagonale 2007
BAGHDAD FRAGMENTS
Film essay (42 min.), UA Diagonale 2007
Shortly before the war breaks out, the author Susanne Ayoub travels to Baghdad to find her family. It is her first encounter with the country of her birth since she left Iraq as a six-year-old with her mother.
Susanne Ayoub tells about five days of a delegation trip and forty years of a family; about love, separation, and death. The film project “Born in Baghdad,” which she started in 2002, goes unfinished. The film footage, taken without permission to film and amid great difficulties, remained a fragment.
The Iraq she visited in 2002 has now disappeared just like the land of her childhood. Four years later, a film emerged from the project that engages the topic of the fragmentariness, the impossibility of her endeavor.
THE JEWEL GARDEN
“Life consists of two parts. The past – a dream. The future – a wish.”
On Christmas Eve in 1955, the paths of Laura and Younis cross. From the bleak Vienna of the postwar era, Laura follows Younis to his home, Baghdad. The world of the Middle East, with its colors, fragrances and sounds, casts its spell over her. But what started out like a fairy tale soon develops into a nearly hopeless drama … Susanne Ayoub’s novel “The Jewel Garden” (Langen Müller 2016) was inspired by her parents’ moving life story and love story, which are interwoven with the political events in the Iraq of the 1960s.
FREITZENSCHLAG. “recreate“ – As part of this event series, which Johannes Wohlgenannt Zincke brought to life 16 years ago, you are invited this year to a very special event, a court festival in Freitzenschlag. Fenced-in, yet open, an exemplary integrative social event.
In cooperation with the Welcome Fellow Human! Association in Gross Gerungs-Langschlag, a court festival will take place on September 17. The motto “The Tigris and Euphrates meet Stallreitern” can be easily explained: “Stallreitern is the name of the field on which the estate in Freitzenschlag stands. The Tigris and Euphrates are at the center of the war zone from which most of the headlines and refugees in the past year have come,” according to the initiator Johannes Wohlgenannt Zincke.
The idea was to organize an event where, if possible, all of those seeking asylum and who are being taken care of here can get involved. “A goal toward which everyone is working, a goal that substantially unites us,” as Wohlgenannt Zincke describes it. “In equal part, however, the Austrians who live here are also active, as organizers, artists, staff, or audience. And it is also important to me to demonstrate a line along which social events in Austria can take place. Integrating, incorporating people into the proverbial whole. In view of our experience, these are details that cannot be expressed clearly enough.”
DVD and Audiobook
The festival begins at 2 p.m. with a reception at the specially constructed Europa Fence, which does make access a bit difficult, but is still open. The fence will be transformed into a gallery: pictures will be shown that have been created collectively by asylum seekers from the Gross Gerungs area as well as artists from the region. After that, musical entertainment until late in the evening is on the schedule: the Children’s Choir, music of the Waldviertel paired with classical music and pop music from the Middle East (DJ Omid) and Central Asia. Food and drink from all these regions will be available. Not least, a film by Susanne Ayoub, “Baghdad Fragment,” will be shown.
Johannes Wohlgenannt Zincke on the subject of refugees and asylum seekers: “What I can do is to get involved with the people who have come to Austria, no matter how they got here. Everyone should have a chance. And perhaps that is my strongest motivation. To advocate for adhering to fundamental rights, regardless of origin and situation, and for preserving the dignity of every human being.”
Book cover, Sprichst du mit mir, Löcker Verlag, 2016
THURSDAY SEPT. 22, 2016 at 7:30 p.m.
Book Launch at the
KUPPITSCH BOOKSTORE
Schottengasse 4, 1010 Wien
SPRICHST DU MIT MIR / YOU TALKING TO ME
On Origins • On Love • On Death
Poems by Susanne Ayoub
with drawings by Rima Al-Juburi
“You Talking to Me” deals with origins, the idea of home and homeland, with identity, following clues, and memory.
In this book of poetry, the versatile author, who works for various media, publishes new poetry. The poems are illustrated by the painter Rima Al-Juburi, with whom a shared history connects Ayoub: both of them were born in Muslim and Christian family constellations, and both now live in Vienna.
Hammurabi awakes
1001 FLUGVERBOT
Der Himmel über Baghdad
gehört den Sternen
den Vögeln
dem Wind
Flugzeugen nicht
der Himmel über Baghdad
ist ein Gedicht
1001 FLIGHT BANS
The sky above Baghdad
belongs to the stars,
the birds,
the wind.
Not to airplanes.
The sky above Baghdad
is a poem.
Translated by Geoffrey C. Howes
In her pictures and painted porcelain vessels, Rima Al-Juburi captures ancient Mesopotamian motifs. Some of them are reproduced in this book.
New literary publications in Austria. “The Jewel Garden.” By Susanne Ayoub. Read by Silvia Meisterle. Edited by Edith-Ulla Gasser.
What started out like a fairy tale soon develops into a nearly hopeless drama. At 25, Laura was no longer a child when she followed Younis. But what did she know about him, about his homeland, about the political turmoil that would soon overshadow the country? Susanne Ayoub was inspired by her parents’ moving life story and love story.
Österreichische Botschaft Kulturforum
Stauffenbergstraße 1
10785 Berlin
Tel: +49-(0)30-20287-0
From July 13 to 15 the conference and workshop “Living the Cooperative City” will take place in Berlin. On the opening evening, Susanne Ayoub will present her novel “The Jewel Garden,” which centers on life between two cultures and two religions:
“The book tells of a young woman’s attempt to find her way into a foreign culture, to deal with its worldviews and rules; the high points and low points of a marriage against the background of politically dramatic times.” (Literadio Leipzig Book Fair 2016)
MEET Susanne Ayoub
DISCUSSION AND BOOK PRESENTATION
Like so many others, Christmas Eve in 1955 begins for Laura with discord in the family home. But then an unexpected visitor appears: Younis, a young man from Baghdad. And all at once everything changes. Before the year is out, Laura and Younis are a couple. Laura leaves Vienna, her parents, and her friends, and follows Younis to Baghdad.
But what did she really know about him, about his homeland, about the political turmoil that would soon overshadow Iraq? Can their love survive times like these? Susanne Ayoub’s novel was inspired by her parents’ moving life story and love story. Her protagonists move in the area of tension between two different cultures and religions.
Susanne Ayoub herself was born in Baghdad. At age 6, she fled with her mother to Vienna and went to a Catholic boarding school. Under tremendous pressure from her father, she later converted to Islam. Today she lives in Vienna. She works as an author and director for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, writes novels, and makes documentary films. In 2014 she received the Dr. Karl Renner Prize for Journalism.
Moderator: Dr. Elisabeth ANKER, Director of the Haus der Begegnung (House of Encounter)
Contribution: 7.00 EUR 7 or 0.7 for Groups / Reduced: 5. EUR ; with a family pass, EUR 3.50; with a Kulturpass, admission is free.
SUSANNE AYOUB, author, and ELISABETH STRATKA, Producer of the Ö1 program HÖRBILDER (Radio Features) discuss the Baghdad Project, which Susanne Ayoub began in 2002 with two trips to Iraq.
Saturday, November 18, 2023
Staudgasse 1
Translation Geoffrey c. Howes
OE1 Kunstsonntag (Arts’ Sunday) New Texts:“The similitude, the most important criterium in portraiture, was there: the beautiful, regular features, the gentle, restrained gaze, the pensive mouth. And then it suddenly morphed into a girl’s face, and every correction only increased that impression. At the last sitting, David saw the bust before John could cover it up. ‘You’ve got to change that,’ he said. ‘My father wouldn’t like it.”
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21 3:05-4:00 PM
The leitmotif of my story ‘Revolution,’ which appeared in the anthology ‘Die Welt, an der ich schreibe‘ (The World I’m Working on in Words), ed. Kurt Neumann, published by Sonderzahl, 2005.
THE MAUTHAUSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP
The name Käthe Leichter is associated with the golden age of Austrian Social Democracy. Few are still familiar with her life and work. Early on she was committed to improving the education and occupational situation of women. Her studies on women’s work in the First Republic are groundbreaking, and her analyses and demands are disturbingly relevant. In 1934, together with her husband, the journalist Otto Leichter, she founded the Revolutionary Socialists. In 1942, this Jewish resistance fighter was murdered by poison gas in the Bernburg/Saale concentration camp.
now she is
They drink dry the eyes of the seeing
leading there had been long and rough. Susanne Ayoub presents portraits of two of the steadfast champions of a woman’s right to vote in her audio piece “Bread and Roses”: the middle-class writer Rosa Mayreder fought for the education and social recognition of women; the Social Democratic politician Adelheid Popp represented the interests of working women, especially the demand that to this day has not been met: equal pay for equal work.
Or is this an effect of the light falling on him from above? Caravaggio’s famous light. He introduced this radiance to the art of painting. La Luce del Vero, the light of truth. Mann an ihrer Seite sieht es nicht an, er wendet sich um, fragend?
Ayoub’s drama combines the story of the theft and the subsequent intensive and often dramatic investigation in the crime with scenes from Caravaggio’s life, his years on the run as a murderer fleeing from the papal ban, until shortly before his death in Sicily, when he paints one of his most moving pictures: the Natività. 
There were only a few steps between her and her house when her eyes lit on a bright red spot, right by the curb. She bent down and found the lost playing card. The queen of hearts was in the company of the jack of spades. She called out after him. This time her voice was clear, but it was drowned out by a passing car. Steel-spoked wheels jolted over the old cobblestones. She drew the key from her coat pocket and was going to unlock the front door when she bumped into rough stone. There was no door there. There was no house.
Let us recall this statement: “The father is not related to his illegitimate child.” Who could have ever come up with this monstrous mockery of all natural and honorable feelings?
well fed and well dressed
wasn’t believed
FREITZENSCHLAG. “recreate“ – As part of this event series, which Johannes Wohlgenannt Zincke brought to life 16 years ago, you are invited this year to a very special event, a court festival in Freitzenschlag. Fenced-in, yet open, an exemplary integrative social event. 
Johannes Wohlgenannt Zincke on the subject of refugees and asylum seekers: “What I can do is to get involved with the people who have come to Austria, no matter how they got here. Everyone should have a chance. And perhaps that is my strongest motivation. To advocate for adhering to fundamental rights, regardless of origin and situation, and for preserving the dignity of every human being.”