Journal notes – that could be the piece of paper on which Uwe Johnson converted Günter Grass’s head circumference into inches in the early 1970s in order to buy a new hat for his colleague in New York. These can be hit parades, such as those kept by Ulf Stolterfoht, those of the West German Country & Western LP Charts from January 2000 (at number 1: Duane Domstaedter and His Cologne Cowboys: “Every Jeck is different”), that can also be one of Jürgen Becker’s list of participants at a Berlin Critics’ Colloquium from 1963 (from Reinhard Baumgart to Giorgio Zampa).
This colloquium, apparently one of his favorite terms, was organized by the founder of the Berlin Literary Colloquium, Walter Höllerer. The busy scientist and poet also launched the LCB magazine “Language in the Technical Age”. It is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, and on this occasion its two current editions are dedicated to such “journal notes”: lists, memories, stories, essays and poems from, on and about the past six decades.
In addition to Becker, FC Delius and Michael Krüger report from the sixties, Gert Loschütz and László F. Földényi remember Berlin in the seventies, just like Ursula Krechel, whose Friedenau memoir is also a beautiful homage to Uwe Johnson and his arithmetic skills. As expected, the eighties were dominated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and Chernobyl, but here, too, authors tell of other authors. Ilma Rakusa reports how she discovered Marguerite Duras in 1980, translated her works and thereby gained clarity about what, as it was called at the time, female writing could mean. Ulrich Peltzer, on the other hand, writes about two men with double names, Rainer Werner Faßbinder and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann: “two double names that have disappeared; like Rainer and Werner and Rolf and Dieter. As if one were embarrassed today, to be called that, so German, so inconspicuous , so common. “
Let’s skip the nineties and noughties and see that the authors of the decade have completely different names, for example Ann Cotten, Alexandru Bulusz and Shidar Bazyar. In its “Notat” from January 4, 2017, the latter captures a downright emblematic scene from the Berlin of the present: a Nazi, a foreigner and a homeless person meet at Wedding underground station … May such magazines and periodicals continue to exist in the future give!