The lecture discusses symptomatic problems which fade into the background through the shift in theories of self-translation from exile and Alien Tongues (1989) to migration, bilingualism and re-writing, followed by leveling the differences of languages involved: namely the translation work itself and the ambivalence of self-translation for authors of ‘minor literatures’. Referring to Benjamin, Derrida, and Goldschmidt, the article assumes that in translation the internal foreignness or exophony of each language meets the external foreignness between different languages. While writing in a foreign language is considered a translation without original, self-translation implies the process of remembering, repeating, working through. Examples: Yoko Tawada, Hannah Arendt, Stéphane Mosès.

pdf von “Selbstübersetzung. Zwischen kleiner Literatur, Exterritorialität und ‘Bilingualismus” in: KulturPoetik, Vol. 21, N. 2,2021:

pdf: “Traduccíon de si. Entre Literatura Menor, Extraterriorialidad y ‘Bilingualism’” in: Revista Chilena de Literatura. Mayo 2021, Numero 103:

After 1933, New York City gave shelter to many leading German and German-Jewish intellectuals. Stripped of their German citizenship by the Nazi-regime, these public figures either stayed in the New York area or moved on to California and other places. This compendium, adopting the title of a famous volume published by Klaus and Erika Mann in 1939, explores the impact the US, and NYC in particular, had on these authors as well as the influence they in turn exerted on US intellectual life.