Foci

Focus Re: Reading Droste

Grafik RE: Reading Droste
© Julia Praschma

Annette von Droste-Hülshoff thought and worked comprehensively: Faith and the Doubt of God - Myths of Masculinity and the Emancipation of Women - War and Peace - Home and Strangers - Dead and Living - Haunting and Crime - Freedom and Confinement. These are just a few of the subjects she has addressed. To do so, she has repeatedly transcended the boundaries of genres, styles, and associated sets of rules.

The work of the Center for Literature on Hülshoff is in this spirit: It brings the writer's legacy to bear by not museumizing Droste. Comparable to an exegesis of texts from the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran, the Center for Literature for this purpose sometimes approaches her texts and her life more closely, sometimes it remains further away; in the knowledge that distance is also proximity.

Re: Reading Droste thus means a constant and polyphonic re-reading, which does not "treat the poetess like a shell, which one may only press and break in all ways in order to reach the core" (Droste-Hülshoff).

The Droste Days will take place annually, as they have since 2013, and will each focus on a specific complex from Droste's work or her biography. In 2018, for example, this will be the crossing of borders, in 2019 the emancipation of the poet as a poet, and in 2020 faith.

The themes will spill over into the forms: For example, when the team at the castle, the public, and artists*ing collect things over a year, as Droste liked to do, and collate them, forming a disparate collection from them -and on this basis, scholars*ing discuss collection concepts in general and the collection concept of a future literature museum at Hülshoff in a colloquium.

The already existing Droste Museum also plays a decisive role in this thematic focus: on the one hand, it allows a five-digit number of visitors a year to immerse themselves visually and acoustically in the world of the Droste-Hülshoffs and especially the poetess. On the other hand, the museum, its objects should become alive in the focus Re: Reading Droste. In experimental guided tours, concerts, and lecture performances, individual exhibits look back and look at the visitors. In this way, perspectives appear in the Biedermeier-style family rooms that do not otherwise occur there. Here lies a cross connection to the focus Blind Spots.