Oswald Egger: Harlequin Coats and Other Stories
Information
Harlequin Coats and Other Matters
with Oswald Egger and Günter M. Ziegler
On the evening of December 9, Villa Aurora, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the publishing house Matthes & Seitz Berlin hosted the book launch for Oswald Egger’s book *Harlequin Coats and Other Matters*. In an entertaining tour de force, Eggers and the moderator, mathematician Prof. Günter M. Ziegler, explored Leibniz’s world of ideas.
In his poetological study, Egger attempts to piece together some aspects of the more obscure ideas and implicitly conceived lines of connection and relationship in Leibniz’s work. His unorthodox interpretation of the rules and results of physics, metaphysics, and mathematics forms a network of interconnections based on internal relationships—often without any obvious link. Vivid models and thought experiments constantly shed light on “how one thing leads to another.” Using both words and non-verbal forms, Oswald Egger draws on several motifs in Leibniz’s work to illustrate connections that “often surprise even him.” In this “poetic endeavor,” the obscure and the convoluted intersect in a compelling manner within a web of evidence.
“Harlequin’s Cloaks and Other Matters” is published by Matthes & Seitz Berlin.
Participants
Prof. Oswald Egger, born in 1963 in Lana, South Tyrol, studied literature and philosophy and now lives in Vienna. He was the editor of the journals Der Prokurist and per procura and organized the Lana Cultural Days. Many of his poems have been translated, including into American English, French, and Dutch. In 2007, he received the Peter Huchel Prize; in 2008, the H.C. Artmann Prize; and in 2010, the Oskar Pastior Prize. In 2001, he received a fellowship at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles; in 2014, he received the Outstanding Artist Award for Literature and a fellowship from Villa Massimo in Rome. Since 2011, he has held the newly established chair in “Language and Form” at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel.
Prof. Günter M. Ziegler, also born in 1963, is a native of Munich and a mathematician. He has been conducting research and teaching at the Free University of Berlin since March 2011. His work focuses, among other things, on the theory of polyhedra. For this, he was awarded the DFG’s Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2001. He received his first (and only) literary award in 1993 for Fragments of a Legend. Together with Martin Aigner, he wrote The BOOK of Proofs, which has since been published in fourteen different languages. In 2009, “Darf ich Zahlen? Geschichten aus der Mathematik” was published by Piper (Munich) in 2009, and “Mathematik – Das ist doch keine Kunst!” (Knaus, Munich) in 2013. He is a member of the Executive Board and spokesperson for the 2015–16 annual theme “Leibniz: Vision as a Task” of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Partner
An event presented by Villa Aurora in cooperation with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Matthes & Seitz Berlin as part of the annual theme
