Eröffnung der Europäischen Literaturtage

Martina Hefter and Eva Weber-Guskar tackle important questions in their most recent books: how is technology changing our emotional lives? How can we rely on feelings when they can be simulated by technology? What are authentic feelings? How do we recognize feelings and how do we develop empathy?

Martina Hefter’s novel, Hey, Good Morning, How Are You?, tells the story of the dancer Juno who lives with her critically ill husband Jupiter. She escapes at nights to online forums to chat with love scammers. She knows that it’s about fake love and being scammed for money. She wants to escape her everyday life and flirts with Benu, a man from Nigeria. Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator in this game of cheating and being cheated?

Eva Weber-Guskar’s book, Feelings of the Future. How We Change Our Life with Emotionalized AI, deals with “Affective Computing”. In other words, the attempt to train computer programmes to replicate emotionality. Will machines ever develop human emotions?

Following the discussion, Martina Hefter reads from her prize-winning novel, awarded the German Book Prize 2024.

*** BIOGRAPHIES ***

Martina Hefter
b. 1965. Writer and performance artist. Her work is multi award-winning, most recently the German Book Prize 2024, the Prix Grand Continent and the Grand Prize of the German Literature Fund. Recently published: Hey, Good Morning, How Are You?, Klett-Cotta 2024.

Eva Weber-Guskar
b. 1977. Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Emotions at the Institute of Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum, where she is Principal Investigator in the interdisciplinary research project “INTERACT! New Forms of Social Interaction with Intelligent Systems”. She has won the Tractatus – Essay Prize of the Philosophicum Lech 2025. Recently published: Feelings of the Future. How We Change Our Life with Emotionalized AI, Ullstein 2024.