Litquake Festival: Reading with Wolfgang Büscher | SF

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Wolfgang Büscher presents his books “Hartland” and “A Spring in Jerusalem” in context of the Litquake Literary Festival 2015.

Wolfgang Büscher: “Hartland”

Wolfgang Büscher has embarked on the adventure: three months, 3,500 kilometers from North to South, walking into the heart of America: He powers through the snow-covered plains of North Dakota, discovers the abandoned town Hartland, once called heartland, and becomes friends with an enigmatic Native American cowboy in the Great Plains. Then, he follows the route 77 from Nebraska to the Rio Grande. Bob Dylan once called this historic street the real heart of America, saying that the country’s spirit could be captured along it. In Kansas, Büscher has to stand at Sheriff’s car with arms spread wide on a highway, he sleeps in a spooky motel and Victorian mansions, flees from a night shelter, is hunted by dogs. Then there is Texas. Ranches, gigantic like small states, the Southern heat. In Waco, where the armed Davidian sect was once beleaguered for weeks by the FBI, he meets the current head of the sect who lives the madness. Büscher goes further, further to the South, until he finally disappears in the Mexican desert.

Wolfgang Büscher: “A Spring in Jerusalem”

Wolfgang Büscher in Jerusalem: he lived in old town for two months, first in an Arab hostel at the Jaffa Gate, then a Greek convent from the Crusader period. He was simply there, and yet he moved on almost two thousand year-old footsteps – Europeans already went to Jerusalem to stay a while or even completely in the first centuries after Christ. Büscher is moving through the spaces, the reverberations of these two thousand years. A place charged with politics, religion, and prophecy. You can hear and see it standing on the Mount of olives at five in the morning, first the muezzins, then the bells, then the first sunlight on the golden dome of the rock.

Büscher immersed himself in all of this. He listens to Jerusalem, takes in its images and voices, penetrates deeper and deeper into the secrets of the city. He spends the days in the Arab Christian, Jewish quarters, in the medium alleys and souks, on the Via Dolorosa, the wailing wall and vaults, where Arab men drink cardamom coffee and smoke hookah. He runs through the Kidrontal, through the garden of Gethsemane, wanders over the roof of Jerusalem and spends one night locked into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. A spring in Jerusalem: a unique journey in an inexhaustible past into a fascinating present.

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