Blind Spots - The 2018 Puterbaugh Keynote

After watching the dance adaptation of her story “Sand” at the 2018 Puterbaugh Festival, Erpenbeck delivered the following keynote, in which she invited the hundreds of attendees in the audience to reckon with their own blind spots—we must “step back in order to see,” she writes, “the entire historical tapestry extending far beyond [our] own lifetimes.”

- Jenny Erpenbeck

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I’m very pleased to speak to you today, particularly since so many fundamental questions that have been hibernating in some blind spot of our consciousness for the past two decades have recently taken on an unaccustomed urgency. Many concepts have suddenly become acute, as it were, and it might be worthwhile to consider their meaning once again from a fresh perspective. One of these concepts, of course, is that of the border—along with the concepts of transition and transgression, in the sense of border crossing. Closely related to these is the concept of freedom.