Max Czollek

No soft focus, no kisses in the sunset, no violins: sadness is at the heart of Max Czollek's poetry collection. And with it the question of how we became what we end up as today. From Friedrichshain to Florida, Vancouver and Pompei, Prague and Tel Aviv: we encounter traces of futile hope everywhere, temporary storage facilities for visions of humanity that have become toxic and have been discarded. And the hope that we have left the destructive 20th century behind us also proves to be in vain. A volume of poetry after the happy endings. A volume of poetry for our present.

Max Czollek is an author and lives in Berlin. Co-editor of the magazine Jalta - Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart and part of the Institute for Social Justice and Radical Diversity. Since 2021 artistic-academic curator of the network Coalition for a Pluralistic Public Discourse (CPPD), since 2023 podcast “Trauer und Turnschuh” with Hadija Haruna-Oelker . With Sasha Marianna Salzmann he initiated the Disintegration Congress 2016 and the Radical Jewish Culture Days 2017 at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Studio Я, as well as the Days of Jewish-Muslim Leitkultur 2020. Idea generator and co-curator of the exhibition “Revenge - History and Fantasy” 2022 at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main. 2024 DAAD Distinguished Chair in Contemporary Poetics at New York University, N YU. The essays “Desintegriert Euch!” (2018), “Gegenwartsbewältigung” (2020) and “Versöhnungstheater” (2023) will be published by Carl Hanser Verlag. The poetry volumes “Druckkammern” (2012) and “Jubeljahre” (2015) and “Grenzwerte” (2019) published by Verlagshaus Berlin.