7 October 2022

The Akademie der Künste Is Opening the Péter Nádas Archive in the Presence of the Author

Sunday, 16 October 2022, 11 am, Pariser Platz, with Péter Nádas, Lothar Müller, Navid Kermani, Ulrich Matthes, Katharina Raabe and Iris Radisch

Hungarian writer and photographer Péter Nádas has transferred his artistic archive to the Akademie der Künste. The opening will take place in the presence of the artist on Sunday, 16 October, at 11 am in the Academy building on Pariser Platz. After Lothar Müller has paid tribute to Nádas, Navid Kermani, Katharina Raabe and Iris Radisch will engage in a discussion with the author. Ulrich Matthes will read from Nádas’s early work, and this will be followed by the writer’s rendition of a passage from his latest novel Schauergeschichten presented for the first time to a German audience. A showcase presentation with writings and memorabilia provides an insight into the artist’s extensive premortem legacy.

With works such as A Book of Memories, the monumental Parallel Stories and his autobiography Világló részletek (Illuminated Details), the artist, who was born in Budapest in 1942, has secured his place in world literature. His oeuvre attests to an extraordinary dual talent, which accounts for the close relationship between image and word evident in his work. The narrative unfolds before our eyes in precisely delineated images, while his photographs allow us to gaze into epic depths. Nádas has received numerous international awards, including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1991), the Kossuth Prize (1992), the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (1995), the Franz Kafka Prize (2003), the Würth Prize for European Literature (2014) and, this year, Sweden’s Berman Literature Prize. He has been a member of the Akademie der Künste since 2006.

The Péter Nádas Archive is an unusually extensive collection comprising 240 archive boxes. It includes all the author’s manuscripts with the associated drafts, notes and collections of materials, correspondence, personal documents and photographs, going right back to the earliest prose piece he wrote as an eleven-year-old schoolboy. The archive contains extensive documentation of the work process involved in each work – be it novella, novel, essay or play – beginning with his debut publication A Biblia (The Bible, 1965/67). Considerable space is taken up by his major novels A Book of Memories (1986; English edn: 1997) and Parallel Stories (2005; English edn: 2011), whose working notes demonstrate his meticulous historical research. The material relating to his family history used in his autobiography Világló részletek (2017) forms an archive of its own. Photographs, a wedding album, documents, family letters and personal objects belonging to his forebears are testimony to the fate of a Jewish family afflicted by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. The correspondence, which comprises some 14,000 pieces of writing, is striking in both its density and its expressiveness. The letters are from family members and personal friends, editors and publishers, literary associates in Hungary – including Géza Ottlik, István Örkény, Magda Szabó, Miklós Mészöly, István Eörsi, György Spíró and Péter Esterházy – scholars and intellectuals, such as Péter Balassa, Árpád Bernáth, László F. Földényi, Ádám Nádasdy, and correspondents from abroad, among them Richard Swartz, Ivan Sanders, Hildegard Grosche and Éva Haldimann. The archive also includes portions of Nádas’s photographic oeuvre.

The Péter Nádas Archive extends the Akademie der Künste’s collection of contemporary Hungarian authors, which already includes the archives of Imre Kertész, György Konrád and Péter Esterházy – their works, which are preserved in Berlin as examples of great European literature, can be accessed for research purposes.

Dates
Péter Nádas: “Zuerst das Bild, dann das Wort” (First Image Then Word)
Opening the archive with Péter Nádas
Welcome address: Werner Heegewaldt
Introduction: Lothar Müller, Gespräch: Navid Kermani, Iris Radisch & Katharina Raabe (moderation)
Reading: Ulrich Matthes
Music: Matan Porat
Sunday, 16 October 2022, 11 am
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin
Admission €6/4; ticket reservations: ticket@adk.de, tel. 030 200 57-1000
Online tickets: adk.de/tickets

Press tickets: To reserve, please email presse@adk.de or telephone 030 200 57-1514

For questions relating to the Péter Nádas Archive, please contact:
Werner Heegewaldt, Director of the Archives, tel. 030 200 57-3100, archivdirektion@adk.de
Katalin Madácsi-Laube, research assistant, tel. 030 200 57-3243, laube@adk.de