How nice it is when you meet people in a literature house who can not only write but also read.
Probably the cities in which there are literature houses. Instead of streaming series, you can go there and hear people talking that you otherwise only know from reading. One not only forms one’s ideas of what the characters in a novel might look like, but also what the author looks like, how they behave, whether they are quiet people or vain, hushed or extroverted. I would have liked to hear Hermann Lenz read, and of course Uwe Johnson or Ingeborg Bachmann. (I only mention the dead because I could go to the living. Unfortunately, you only notice this when someone who was still alive has died.) I’ve heard Günter Grass a few times. He was as confident-mustached as he was known to be in public. When he campaigned for the SPD again in 2002, he was sitting in a community center somewhere in Brandenburg one evening. He seemed to me like an older quote from himself from the time of the great Willy Wahlen.