In an interview with Writeaboutsomething
Where do you live?
Laura and Katja: We both live in Berlin.
How old are you?
Laura: I'm almost 29.
Katja: Almost 31.
What do you study?
Laura: I'm doing my doctorate in art history at the HU Berlin. I studied German and art history for a bachelor's/master's degree.
Katja: I received my master's degree in German literature/philosophy and modern history at the University of Jena in 2008. I have been working as an online editor since 2009 and am currently a marketing assistant at a digital publisher.
Does your blog have anything to do with your studies?
Laura: Yes, because I blog together with Katja about literature and art, exactly the areas that I have been dealing with in my studies for years. We have also been exchanging ideas privately for years about what concerns us in these areas, and we also read books together or visit exhibitions.
Katya: Of course. Because I like to read and like to engage with literature in writing, I studied. By blogging about literary texts, I continue a little bit of what the humanities studies were all about - the intensive immersion in literature, the assessment and comparison. Of course, we don't blog scientifically, but rather in an understandable way for non-German readers beyond the ivory tower. We would like to appeal to and inspire people to their own knowledge who enjoy reading a variety of sophisticated and international literature and engaging with art.
Why do you blog about literature?
Laura: The blog gives us space to reflect on what we have read and seen and at the same time to exchange ideas with others. It's important to me not only to be alone with my books and impressions, but also to be able to talk about them with others. The Internet is ideal for this.
Katja: I read because it makes me happy and I like to let the language take me into the author's fantasy world. Just like Laura, through blogging I like to exchange and confront other people with completely contradictory opinions and viewpoints. Everyone experiences a book differently, reads it with their own reading expectations, has a different reading horizon and it is fascinating to exchange ideas about it. It is similar with a work of art that everyone perceives differently. I would like to learn something from and with others in order to put my opinion into perspective and step out of the lonely reading experience. I don't blog to present myself and my everyday life. I think that's uninteresting. It's more about reflection and discussion.
What are your favorite writers and why?
Laura: Haruki Murakami, because he combines real and magical elements in his books and thereby creates a fascinating world of his own. David Foster Wallace, because with incredible ingenuity he holds up a mirror to our society in a way that makes you shudder. And Christa Wolf, because in her works she reproduces and reflects German history in an incomparable way.
Katja: Mhm, difficult, that would get out of hand. If I limit myself to a few that show the range of my interests, they would be Franz Kafka, Georg Trakl, Jonathan Franzen and Sibylle Berg. I studied Kafka intensively in my master's thesis and am fascinated by the spaces of association and narrative depth in his novel fragments, which are a constant reading experience. Georg Trakl's poetry is tragic, dark, sad, full of visual power and intense poetry that grabs me. Jonathan Franzen is an intelligent, entertaining and socially critical novelist who fabulously portrays the modern Western world and its basic problems in his character constellations. Sibylle Berg is a unique author with a very special sense of humor who writes books that are the ax to the frozen sea within us - it hurts and you learn something from it. Many of her sentences are so depressingly absurd and comically poetic that I want to collect them.
How do you choose the books you review?
Laura: In a nutshell: What moves me strongly is reviewed, whether negative or positive.
Katja: I don't write about every book I read. I decide spontaneously or based on the time factor, there is no system. Unless it was a very unimpressive work that I simply can't and don't want to say anything about. This rarely happens because I carefully select what I read. We don't want to repeat ourselves when we recommend authors to each other. Sometimes we consciously read a book at the same time and then write a blog dialogue about it. I also think that dialogue is an important characteristic of our style of blogging. Dialogue with each other and with the many other readers out there.
How long has your blog been around?
Laura and Katja: We designed and started the blog together more than a year ago.
Why did you start blogging?
Laura: I think it was Katja's idea. I am very grateful to her for that
We also want to share our reading and art impressions with others and exchange ideas with blog readers.
Katja: =) I initially got involved with blogs professionally and wrote for various blogs and got to know WordPress. It was only much later that the idea of blogging privately came about. We've been exchanging what we've read for years, now we're making it public. A completely new experience and we complement each other well.
How much time does blogging take?
Laura: For me that's about five hours a week (not counting reading the novels). Sometimes more. It depends on how much time I can spare between my doctorate and my part-time job.
Katja: Since I work full time and am also online, I usually only get to blog longer articles on weekends or on vacation. I can't even give an average time. Blogging is not just writing and publishing articles, but also reading and following other blogs and commenting on our and others' posts, which can easily take 2 hours in the evening...
Do you think that your blog will help you advance your career?
Laura: Who knows? I don't rule anything out. Since I deal with exhibitions and artists in our blog and plan to do so more, there is certainly an opportunity to make contacts. And these are always valuable for advancing professionally.
Katja: For me it was more of the opposite: blogging professionally made me want to blog privately and got to know the technical background. You can say that we take this seriously and think carefully about what we say in our articles and how we express ourselves. We stand behind our little blog and are proud that we have a few regular readers with whom we have a more or less constructive exchange from time to time.
Do you think you'll continue blogging after you graduate?
Laura: Definitely. In a sense, books and pictures have become so firmly anchored in my life, not just through my studies and blogging, but in general, that I can no longer imagine life without them. It would be like an amputation. And since blogging helps me to share, reflect, sort and ultimately preserve my impressions, I would like to continue it.
Katja: Since I left my studies a few years ago and only started afterwards, the question is unnecessary. I don't know how long I'll have time or leisure to move around in the digital world in this way. We will see. Now it's fun and remains exciting. In any case, reading itself is more important than blogging about it - you could put it this way: we blog because we read, not read because we blog.
Writeaboutsomething
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In an interview with Writeaboutsomething Where do you live? Laura and Katja: We both live in Berlin. How old are you? Laura: I'm almost 29. Katja: Almost 31. What are you studying? Laura: I'm doing my doctorate in art history at the HU Berlin. I studied German and art history for a bachelor's/master's degree. Katja: I got my master's degree in German studies in 2008
