titre provisoire

In the context of the exhibition in Lüneburg 2023, we have initiated the republication of Erika Runge's text Überlegungen beim Abschied von der Dokumentarliteratur and to accompany the German text with a new English translation (Reflections Upon Saying Farewell to Documentary Literature). In this text, Erika Runge writes about her intention to abandon documentary literature in favor of fictional writing. In doing so, she negotiates subjective questions in search of a language that expresses the class system and criticizes the emerging neoliberalism of the late 1980s. By commenting on the criticism of her book Bottroper Protokolle, she reflects some of the conflict lines of her time, such as realism vs. fiction and imagination, the presence of the author as I, the search for a language that negotiates the class struggle, the (im)possibility of an empathetic dialogue between artists and the working class.