We want to take this opportunity and thank all of you who believed in this movement and who supported it. The release date of our DVD is still not fixed as our editor is busy preparing for graduation, but rest assured it will be released as soon as possible. It has become a bit quiet around here, but there is quite a lot happening behind the scenes – stay tuned.

To many more years!

Sara reads “das verlorengegangene Lebensgefühl”
Joël Adami reads “teenage angst has pissed off well, I think”
Thierry Heles reads “Les jeunes mélancoliques – Ein Entwurf”

They can all be found under Events.

As the whole reading took over two hours, we are unable to provide the whole reading as a download file. However we are planning to make it available on a DVD which will be available against a handling & shipping fee. More information on this will follow as we’re still working out the details.

We have put online a couple of pictures (thanks to Nico Heles) for those of you who couldn’t make it and of course for those of you who want to reminisce this great evening. There’s also over two hours of video material which we’re now sifting through. We will put up a couple of videoclips in the days to come, so stay tuned.

There are already two reviews online, one’s by Georges Walther aka bloGeescht, and the other one is by Joël Seiller.

Again, a big thanks to all of you!

D:qliq is located in the rue du St. Esprit at number 17 in Luxembourg-City. The reading will take place on the first floor (the staircase is situated in the back corner of the ground floor by the bar).

Hope to see all of you there!

In case you won’t be able to make it, rest assured: the event will be filmed in its entirety and photographs will be taken – all of which will be published on here in the days following the event.

When we arrived in Glasgow, Leila was already waiting for Gian. When they locked each other in their arms and kissed I suddenly remembered the beginning of a wonderful movie I had seen long ago. I could even hear Hugh Grant saying “love, actually, is all around” in my head. At least the Italian saying was gone for a moment.
        Gian’s girlfriend somehow looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why and I quickly decided that it was a meaningless déjà-vu.
        He introduced us and asked if I cared to join them for a drink before we’d go our separate ways. I am usually not the type who quickly bonds with people but the last two hours on the plane were quite enjoyable and that uncanny feeling about Leila intrigued me. I had no plans for the evening anyway, so I agreed. The meeting with my editor was scheduled for the next day at 4 p.m., so I could easily sleep through the morning. In Berlin, my parents hadn’t allowed me many zeds, they were too excited that I was finally home again after six months. And when they slept, I went to the Sony Centre to meet up with some old friends. It was a great week.

We went to a pub right next to the airport and sat down by the window from where we had a great view of the runway. As Gian paid for a round, Leila told me she had grown up in Berlin too, but she and Gian were having a long-distance relationship. She was an assistant lecturer at the University of Glasgow and he was working for an insurance company in Berlin.
        When it was my turn to pay for a round I asked Leila what drink she’d like. Suddenly the Italian saying vanished for a second time and I heard the Ouverture of Gershwin’s World playing in my head, which confused me even more. I hadn’t heard that song in years; I couldn’t even remember when I had last listened to some Hancock.
        Leila and Gian both asked for a cup of coffee. I wanted to go for an Irn-Bru but then decided to order a toddy - I needed something to pull myself together and Craig Ferguson once noted that whiskey solves any problem as long as it’s hot. I had never tried it, but when in Glasgow, do as the Glaswegians do.
        As it turned out, comedians sometimes do tell the truth. The toddy tasted great and I felt a bit better. Gershwin’s World was no more and Gian and I started telling Leila about the trouble of getting through the check-in with all the fans of the winning teams arrriving and those of the losing teams leaving. I have never been into football - or any other kind of sport for that matter - but I am usually a calm person, however, that chaos was annoying. Luckily, it was not as bad as the disaster that came to be known as the World Youth Days in Cologne the year before. Some people still talk about Teutonic thoroughness, but we are far not as thorough as we like to think.
        I can’t remember exactly how but at some point we ended up exchanging stories from our various encounters with the punks at the Alexanderplatz. Perhap U2’s Zoo Station playing on the radio inspired us to discuss the social issues in Berlin. I got carried away and started talking about the love of my youth, who just so happened to have been a punk. Unsurprisingly, I lost a bit of their sympathy when I started reminiscing about Zoe. Or should I say they lost a bit of my sympathy when they showed no understanding of the problems that can drive teenagers into becoming punks - for example a father who sets off to Thailand and leaves his family behind, as was the case with Zoe’s dad. I sometimes wonder why she is the only girl I end up remembering time and again. Admittedly it is hard to imagine falling in love with a girl who has blue hair and more piercings in her face than any other punk, but it’s not as if she had been like Christiane F. who had been a heroin addict and prostitute by the age of 14. Christiane didn’t even hang around on Alexanderplatz, but at the Bahnhof Zoo and anyway that was in the seventies. I felt uncomfortable justifying my ex-girlfriend and I decided to stop remembering my youth. I was just about to change topics by asking Leila what it is like teaching at the University of Glasgow when her phone rang.

        ”Oh my god that lady’s just been hit by that car!”, she screamed.
        ”Go look for a phone booth and call 112, I’ll check on her,” I shouted, running towards the woman.
        ”I got a mobile…”
        ”She’s still alive but she’s heavily wounded! Where’s the bloody car?!”
        ”It’s gone. Hit and run.”
        ”Fuck! Have you called the ambulance?”
        ”On its way.”
        ”She’s unconscious!”
        ”It’s gonna take them at least ten minutes to get here. You know first aid?”
        ”I can remember a few but…”

The memory was foggy after seven years but the woman looked incredibly similar to Leila. When she had put down her phone I realised that it had actually been her mobile that triggered the memory, even though it wasn’t the same phone of course.
        I tried remembering more of the scene but it was like Marcel Proust’s famous scene of the madeleine, at every attempt the images fainted more and more. I thought about asking Leila, but after having gotten off track and talked about my punk girlfriend earlier I didn’t want to add any more weirdness to their first impression of me in case I was just imagining the woman having been Leila. I would probably never see them again but, as I said, I am not the guy who quickly bonds with people and I actually started to feel quite at ease with these two. Messing it up and parting in total awkwardness was not at all how I wanted the evening to end.
        I had decided that asking Leila about her favourite musical genre was the easiest way to go - if she didn’t like Jazz, I’d know that it couldn’t have been her who I met at that Jazzfest back then.
        Thinking back, I am surprised that we went our separate ways and never saw each other again after that fateful night. Leila, if it had been her, was one of those very few girls who not only are stunningly beautiful but with whom you can also have a meaningful conversation. Perhaps that was the reason why I had accepted the invitation to drink a pint with them even though I thought I didn’t know them - well, I was still pretty sure I had never met Gian before.

        ”I would never have expected seeing another person as young as me here,” I heard the girl behind me say.
        ”Well I like to blame my father for it, he listens to Jazz all day long. And he particularly likes Hancock. He tells everyone that Hancock is the best. He must have passed that passion onto me,” I replied, turning around.
        ”Oh I love Herbie Hancock.”
        ”Really? So we found one similarity. Two more and you’ll have to go drink a coffee with me afterwards,” I answered, deciding that the girl in front of me was absolutely worth flirting with.
        ”Silly you! Of course we both like Hancock, we’re standing in line to enter the concert hall,” she said.
        ”Don’t look for excuses, you’re the one who started this conversation after all,” I replied in an overly cocky voice.
        ”Because I was bored,” she teasingly answered.
        ”Ouch,” I said, looking down on the floor.
        ”You don’t even know my name…”
        ”Yet.”

Leila liked Jazz. She even started talking about having been to some Jazz concerts. I didn’t dare asking her if she’d ever been to the Jazzfest though. I still couldn’t get a clear image of the girl I met back then. Maybe it was Leila, but I could only remember small pieces of that day and I didn’t trust them as they were really fuzzy.
        After two hours we had come to talk about my book of which I was going to hand in the final draft the next day. Gian asked me about every detail of the story, even though he had already bombarded me with questions on the plane. I decided to tell him about the chapter in which the main character receives her nonna’s secret receipe for the best pasta in the world (leaving out the fact that I had also written about how pasta was actually invented by the Chinese and not the Italian) on her wedding day. That did it for Gian. He started talking about his nonna as soon as I had finished my sentence. You have got to love Italian people and the incredible pride they take in la famiglia, especially their mother or, in this case, grandmother. Leila told Gian to stop however, complaining about getting a headache from the same old story.

        ”Hey, you alright?” she asked me.
        ”Did the doctor just say she’s dead, before they closed the door and drove off?” I asked, trembling.
        ”He said she had a cardiac arrest, he didn’t say she was dead. All we can do now is hope that she makes it,” she tried comforting me, though of course it wasn’t any real comfort.
        ”There’s only hope while there’s life. She wasn’t alive when they put her in the ambulance.”
        ”There is nothing else you could have done.”
        ”She looked so young. She certainly wasn’t older than we are.”
        ”Come on, let’s go get a cup of coffee and talk about it.”
        ”I can’t believe I couldn’t remember how to move her into the lateral recumbent position.”
        ”It wasn’t your fault. She was severely hurt and you were not the one who hit her in the first place.”
        ”Still… Did you ask what hospital they are taking her to?”
        ”No…”

I remembered having gone to a café opposite the concert hall. I remembered having sat there with this girl who only two hours earlier I had actually wanted to ask out and who now was trying to comfort me about another girl. I remembered feeling inane. But I had blotted out the memory of that day completely long ago and it was only coming back slowly. I couldn’t even remember her name. Perhaps we never introduced ourselves.
        I looked at Leila and tried concentrating, maybe this time I would succeed in putting all the pieces of memory back together. She looked back at me; surely I must have seemed like an obsessed person when I stared at her face. Why didn’t she recognise me? Maybe I was mistaken and it hadn’t been her after all. She asked me if something was wrong, which I denied at first, but then I saw a scar on the top of her forehead, covered beneath her auburn hair.

A crippled human walking past
The ruins of a crashed mall,
A deadened soul creeping through
The foul mud left behind.

Echoes of poltergeists moaning,
Much cry and little wool,
They have already bitten the dust.

A thirsty alcoholic drinking
The last glass of leaded water,
A dying past redemption
Expectorating till the last breath.

Harsh wind in sinister streets,
Blue light onto burning debris,
Vanishing footsteps on ashes,
Dead child under a rotten bench.

Das Gefühl der Unzufriedenheit plagt eine komplette Generation in einem Ausmaße wie es seit langem nicht mehr der Fall war. Das fin du siècle war womöglich die letzte ähnliche Bewegung - das Jazz Age einmal aussen vorgelassen, denn in den 1920ern war es immerhin die ältere Generation die von dieser Unzufriedenheit geplagt wurde, während die Jugend immer dekadenter wurde. Vielleicht ist heute am Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts aber zum ersten Mal beides der Fall: die Welt verändert sich in einem nie dagewesenen Tempo und der Spalt zwischen den Generationen wird immer größer. Es mag eine subjektive Beobachtung sein, aber mir kommt es so vor, als würden die jüngeren Generationen so radikal wie nie zuvor eine neue Kultur erschaffen - vom Krumping bis hin zum Nutzen neuer Technologien. In den letzten Jahren sind mehr neue Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten entstanden als jemals zuvor in der Geschichte der Menschheit; von der Wandmalerie zum Buch verlangte es Jahrtausende, vom Buch zum Radio Jahrhunderte und vom Radio zum Fernsehen Jahrzehnte. Vom farbigen Fernsehen zum Internet brauchte es nur noch wenige Jahre und das Internet hat in wenigen Jahren soviele Möglichkeiten geschaffen wie nie zuvor. Von Blogs über Podcasts bis hin zu Videoportalen erschließen sich einer Generation, welche mit diesen Entwicklungen aufgewachsen ist, plötzlich fantastische Ausdrucksformen. Dass dabei auch viel wertloser Inhalt entsteht ist unabdingbar, verringert aber nicht das Potenzial der Entwicklungen.

Am Ende des Tages bleibt aber dieses große Problem bestehen: Massenkultur – ein Wort, das bereits in sich einen Widerspruch darstellt. Kultur entsteht durch individuelle Sichtweisen, neue Definitionen von Altbekanntem, das Brechen von Konventionen und Regeln. Kultur kann nie einer Masse gerecht werden. Wenn Millionen von Menschen Harry Potter lesen ist das keine Kultur, sondern das Resultat einer groß angelegten Marketingstrategie des Mainstreams. Wenn Millionen von Menschen sich den neusten Spielberg Film ansehen, ist das keine Kultur sondern das Konsumieren eines Produktes. Ein Wort welches das Problem passend illustriert ist die Bezeichnung Kulturindustrie. Kultur wird dessen beraubt was sie eigentlich ausmacht: Originalität. Wenn einer eine Idee hat, wird sie entweder sofort patentiert oder gleich von allen kopiert anstatt interpretiert. Klauen ist einfacher als nachdenken. Die Industrie versteht Kultur hier aber absolut falsch: Kultur heisst nicht, sich von Produkten berieseln lassen, sondern das genaue Gegenteil davon: richtige Kultur regt zum Nachdenken an. Sie entzieht sich jeglichem banalem Konsumieren sondern verlangt dem Betrachter ein Stück von sich selbst ab. Kultur ist nicht nur das bloße obligatorische Besuchen des Louvre, das Ansehen des neusten Hollywood Filmes oder Lesen des letzten Dan Browns.

Wir brauchen wieder etwas, das uns verbindet. Eine Basis die nicht auf kommerziellem Interesse beruht, sondern auf dem Drang kreativ zu sein. Eine Basis die es nicht erlaubt einfach nur zu konsumieren. Eine Basis die es erlaubt auf anderes aufzubauen und nicht nur eine bloße Kopie zu schaffen. Möglichkeiten dazu existieren bereits genug: ein besonders hervorzuhebendes Phänomen sei das Podiobook, eine Form des Podcasting bei der unveröffentlichte Autoren ihr Werk als Podcast publizieren - zu einem großen Teil den “großen” Autoren überlegen. Das ist aber nicht genug. Wir brauchen wieder eine literarische Bewegung die sich nicht auf ein bestimmtes Thema stützt, sondern vielmehr den Autoren die Möglichkeit lässt, ihre Ideen niederzuschreiben. Eine Bewegung die den Drang nach Selbstexpression unterstützt. Eine Bewegung die sich nicht durch bestimmte Stilfiguren definieren lässt, sondern gerade durch das Nichtvorhandensein dieser. Eine Bewegung die so vielfältig ist wie die Gedanken ihrer Autoren. Eine Bewegung für eine aufstrebende Generation von Autoren die sich nicht einem Herausgeber und dessen Ideen unterwerfen wollen, eine Bewegung dessen Ziel es nicht ist von der Masse anerkannt zu werden, sondern verstören will.
     Eine Bewegung die sich den Problemen der Welt bewusst ist und den Menschen wieder zum Nachdenken anregen will. Werke die es wagen unbequeme Fragen zu stellen, eine neue Sichtweise auf Dinge zu geben, Konventionen zu brechen. Autoren die unzufrieden sind mit der Kommerzialisierung der Kultur. Autoren die das schreiben, wozu sie den Drang verspüren und nicht was ihnen von der Kulturindustrie vorgeschrieben wird. Autoren die am Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts stehen und erkennen, dass die eingeschlagene Richtung die falsche ist. Autoren die Kultur wieder zu dem machen wollen, was sie einmal war: kreativ.