CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Berlin Stories: Literary Journeys through the City
Panel Discussion

Weill Recital Hall
Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 2:00 PM

Panelists:
Jeffrey Eugenides
Daniel Kehlmann
Nicole Krauss
Peter Schneider
Michael Naumann, Moderator

For centuries, writers and poets have attempted to capture Berlin’s hypnotic spirit in words. Four acclaimed novelists reflect on the city’s many faces and its continuing appeal to new generations of authors.

Presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with the American Academy in Berlin.

The Berlin in Lights festival is made possible by a leadership gift from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation.

Major funding has also been provided by Mercedes and Sid Bass, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from Martha and Bob Lipp, Fundación Mercantil (Venezuela), and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional funding provided by Axel Springer AG, GWFF USA Inc., and the Jerome Robbins Foundation.

Panelists:
Jeffrey Eugenides
Daniel Kehlmann
Nicole Krauss
Peter Schneider
Michael Naumann, Moderator
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, the third son of an American-born father whose Greek parents emigrated from Asia Minor and an American mother of Anglo-Irish descent. Mr. Eugenides was educated at public and private schools, graduated from Brown University, and received an MA in English and creative writing from Stanford University in 1986. Two years later, he published his first short story.

Mr. Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides (FSG), was published in 1993. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, Gettysburg Review, and Granta. His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Recently, he has been a Fellow of the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of The American Academy in Berlin. Mr. Eugenides now lives in Berlin with his wife and daughter.

DANIEL KEHLMANN
Daniel Kehlmann was born in 1975 in Munich, the son of a director and an actress. He attended a Jesuit college in Vienna, traveled widely, and has won several awards for previous novels and short stories, most recently the 2005 Candide Award.

Mr. Kehlmann made his literary debut in 1997, with the novel Beerholms Vorstellung, and was immediately rewarded with the Förderpreis des Kulturkreises der deutschen Wirtschaft. He has since published, among other novels, Der fernste Ort (2004) and the 2003 international bestseller, Ich und Kaminski. His collection of short stories, Unter der Sonne, appeared in 1998. His latest novel, Die Vermessung der Welt, has as its protagonists Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss. The English translation, Measuring the World, was published in 2006 by Pantheon in a translation by Carol Brown Janeway. Mr. Kehlmann’s works have been translated into more than 20 languages, and Measuring the World became an instant bestseller in several European countries.

Mr. Kehlmann served as writer-in-residence at New York University’s Deutsches Haus in 2006. He lives in Vienna.

NICOLE KRAUSS
Nicole Krauss is the author of the novels Man Walks Into a Room and The History of Love, which won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and in 2007 she was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. She was born in New York City in 1974 and now lives in Brooklyn. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages.

PETER SCHNEIDER
Born in 1940 and raised in southern Germany, Peter Schneider has greatly contributed to the literary and cultural life of Germany over the last four decades. After finishing his studies in German, history, and philosophy in 1964, Schneider became a central figure in the 1968 Student Protest Movements in Berlin and Turin, Italy. After completing his Staatsexamen in higher education, Mr. Schneider began his career as a writer with his novel Lenz. After the success of Lenz in Germany, over 20 other novels, screenplays, and volumes of journalistic essays followed, including several that were translated into English: Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper, 1984), Extreme Mittelage (The German Comedy, 1990), Paarungen (Couplings, 1996), and Eduards Heimkehr (Edward’s Homecoming, 2000). Schneider’s screenplays were filmed by Reinhard Hauff (Messer im Kopf [Knife in the Head]) and Margarethe von Trotta (Das Versprechen [The Promise]). His essays can be found in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, New York Times, Time magazine, and Le Monde.

Since 1985, Mr. Schneider has served as a guest professor at Stanford, Princeton, Dartmouth, Harvard, Washington University in St. Louis, and Georgetown University. During the 1996–97 academic year, Mr. Schneider was awarded a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Since 2001, Mr. Schneider has served as the Roth Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University. During the spring of 2002 he taught at the Emory College’s Halle Institute as a Distinguished Fellow.

Peter Schneider lives in Berlin and Italy with his wife and children.

MICHAEL NAUMANN
Michael Naumann studied political science, philosophy, and history in Munich and Oxford. He worked as a journalist for Der Spiegel and Die Zeit (as publisher and chief editor, 2001–07). Between 1985 and 1995, he was head of Rowohlt Verlag, one of the largest trade publishers in Germany, and then, until 1998, he ran Metropolitan Books (which he founded) and Henry Holt Inc. in New York as CEO and president. For two years he was Germany’s first Federal Cultural Minister in the cabinet of Gerhard Schröder. At the moment he is on leave from Die Zeit, running for mayor of Hamburg on the Social Democratic ticket.