Echo. Echo: Ghosts of the Past
A collaborative series between the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” and the international literature festival berlin
In 2025, the cooperative series Echo. Echo – co-organised by the international literature festival berlin (ilb) and the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities” – takes a turn toward hauntology. This year’s events centre on ghostly presences through which past events, forgotten histories and half-buried tales reappear. These literary ghosts inhabit and traverse the texts, disrupting narrative linearity and interweaving multiple strands of time. Sometimes, they carry contested collective memories or fractured lineages; in other instances, they surface as folk tales that acquire new meanings through contemporary retellings. In the works of the invited authors, ghosts re-emerge and re-materialise, bridging temporal layers and contexts, and – most crucially – illuminating the present.
A special focal point of Ghosts of the Past is its collaboration with the ilb’s Children and Youth Literature Program, a vital platform for promoting literacy and engaging young people in Berlin with literature across diverse forms and media. The programme not only organises readings for pupils of all ages, but also hosts workshops that foster active and creative encounters with writing, illustration and the intermedial dimensions of literature.
As part of the series, Anna Hoghton will showcase her youth novel Orla and the Wild Hunt – a story that follows two children travelling to visit their Irish grandmother after the death of their mother. Shortly after their arrival at the family home, their grandmother disappears, prompting a magical and adventurous journey to find her. The novel is a rich tapestry of Irish mythological figures and the fragmented stories they carry. It is also a profound meditation on grief, memory and the ways we remain connected through shared histories and acts of care. The event also includes an object theatre workshop in collaboration with Schaubude Berlin. Drawing on selected passages from the novel, participating students will create their own objects, figures and props, using them to develop short scenes that bring the world of Orla and the Wild Hunt to life on stage.
Dayeon Auh will present her beautifully illustrated book The Three-Year Tumble, in which a traditionally fatal tale about falling on a mountain is reimagined. After experiencing such a fall, a grandfather becomes haunted by the fear of impending death. However, a visit from his granddaughter inspires him to rewrite the narrative, transforming it into a story of life-affirmation. This intergenerational exchange highlights the possibility of reinterpreting inherited truths and celebrates the transformative power of love. An accompanying workshop, held in collaboration with Krumulus Berlin, will guide young readers in exploring the visual dimension of the book in their own drawings and paintings.
In the main programme, author Isabella Hammad will read from her acclaimed novel Enter Ghost, which revolves around questions of Palestinian identity in the diaspora. The narrative centres on a woman from the Palestinian diaspora, who grew up mostly in the UK; visiting her sister in occupied Palestine, she gets involved in a production of Hamlet adapted to reflect the lived realities of decades-long expropriation, occupation and colonisation. Through this engagement, she reclaims her connection to the Palestinian cause and its historical context. Isabella Hammad will be in conversation with Hanan Natour, a postdoctoral researcher at EXC 2020 whose work focuses on modern Arabic literature from the Maghreb and on literary networks between North Africa, the Levant and Europe.
Project heads: Sima Ehrentraut (EXC 2020) & Simone Schröder (ilb)
Curatorial consultant: Hanan Natour (EXC 2020)
Cooperation Cluster & Junges Programm: Maud Ruget (ilb), Lena Scheitz (ilb), Jan Fusek (EXC 2020), and Sima Ehrentraut (EXC 2020)
Echo. Echo. is an annual series of events and a cooperation between the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective" and the international literature festival berlin (ilb), in which literature is understood as a multi-voiced, diverse field of resonance. What voices – other than that of the author – can be heard in a poem, novel or textual fragment? What echoes of voices, literary traditions and narrative forms can be discerned? Through readings and conversations, the series explores the resonance between past and contemporary literatures and hosts discussions with authors about the echoes in their texts.
