This talk will be held in German.

A year before Maxi Obexer published her novel Unter Tieren (Among Animals, 2023), she wrote a widely acclaimed essay titled “Über Tiere schreiben, über Tiere sprechen” (Writing About Animals, Speaking About Animals, 2022). In it, Obexer grapples with what it means to write about animals in a language deeply shaped by human dominance – one that routinely disparages animals and frames them as deficient beings. Her 2023 novel then delivers on the demands of her essay. Rather than speaking about animals, Obexer speaks of them, adopting their perspectives without ever resorting to anthropomorphism. She explores a gift that easily exceeds human imagination: the trust animals extend to us. Both Unter Tieren and her essay collection Odysseus’ Hund – Erzählungen von der gegenseitigen Zähmung (Odysseus’s Dog – Tales of Mutual Taming, 2024) seek a language that recognizes animals as subjects rather than objects of human thought. In her talk, Obexer will read from these two works, furthering this inquiry through literary, philosophical, and cultural reflection.

Maxi Obexer is a prominent German-language author and playwright whose work examines language, power, and political imagination. Raised in South Tyrol and thus in fact in Italy, and based in Berlin, she has earned numerous accolades, including the Eurodram Prize, the Alice Salomon Poetics Prize, and a Bachmann Prize nomination. Her fundamentally feminist writing addresses issues of migration, European identity, feminist politics, and non-human subjecthood. Co-founder of the New Institute for Dramatic Writing and former interim co-president of PEN Center Germany, Obexer has taught at Dartmouth College, Georgetown University, the University of Arts (Universität der Künste) Berlin, and the Literaturinstitut Leipzig. We are honored to have her at UW–Madison as Max Kade Writer in Residence in the fall of 2026.