CSR.ART, in collaboration with Berlin gallery Z22, invites you to a reading with Sue and Wilfried Schwerin von Krosigk on Friday, 24 October 2025, at 7 p.m. The author couple will read from their joint novel Der Totenversteher (The Dead Man’s Friend). The reading will take place at CSR.ART in the Bikini Haus, framed by the current exhibition Z22 GOES BIKINI. Admission is free.
Fig. above: Nadia Valeska, Any Given Name (neither here nor there) (VI), 2019, oil on paper, 22 x 30 cm
In the novel ‘Der Totenversteher’ (The Dead Man’s Friend), Count Hasi is joined not only by an art dealer, but also, fittingly for the upcoming Halloween, by a contract killer and the afterlife. Here’s what listeners can expect: Everything could be so simple! A lavish inheritance has freed Hartung Siegward Graf von Quermaten zu Oytinghausen from his financial woes. But the good life is soon over. Hasi, as the count is known to everyone, not only proves to be an easy victim for an investment fraudster, but also gets in the way of a philosophising contract killer. Kept on his toes by his deceased aunt, who sends him messages from the afterlife, enlisted by a neighbour as a medium for séances, and under constant pressure from a cunning art dealer, Hasi realises too late that his life is in danger.
About Sue and Wilfried von Krosigk (written by themselves)
Sue was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1959. Her first favourite author was Dr. Seuss (The Cat in the Hat), and she would bite her father’s finger with joy every time he read the most beautiful sentence, ‘and the cat was verrrry smart’. Early television excesses included ‘Miss Helen’ and the worm Oogly Woogly, who dismissed preschoolers from the (green-grey and curved) screen with the exhortation: ‘And now make me proud!’
In London, Sue was enrolled in a progressive comprehensive school in the late 1960s. The shock of the daily overdose of reality at the notorious Holland Park Comprehensive led her to make herself at home in a hiding place under the kitchen sink after school. While her parents searched for her, she devoured Astrid Lindgren’s ‘Kalle Blomquist’ series, the terrible schoolgirls of ‘St. Trinians’ (Ronald Searle), Richmal Compton’s ‘Just William’ series and C.S. Lewis’ ‘Chronicles of Narnia’. After the kitchen sink was cleared in favour of a psychedelically spruced-up youth room, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (TV and print) provided essential moral support during puberty.
As an English scholar, Sue studied Shakespeare, Marlowe, John Donne, Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe in Bonn, and wrote about English satirists of the Enlightenment, which led her many years later to found a branch of the British Sunday Assembly, a church-like, anti-religious Sunday event, in Berlin. During her studies, she was particularly interested in the twentieth century, with the poems of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes and the offbeat novels of Mervyn Peake and Thomas Pynchon. She wrote her master’s thesis on the unfinished trilogy ‘The Human Condition’ by Richard Hughes, who in his novels has an unsophisticated Englishman travel through Germany during the rise of National Socialism as a naïve chronicler. An unjustly forgotten English author. But the most important author was, is and will remain for all eternity Charles Dickens.
Today, the brilliant Edward St. Aubyn, Wolfgang Herrndorf, Heinrich Steinfest and the Duden (Grammar Volume 4) lie on her bedside table. Since Sue started teaching German to refugees, she has been at least as fascinated by the peculiarities of German grammar as she is by an exciting novel.
Born in 1954, Wilfried did not speak at all for the first three years of his life, much to his parents’ dismay, but then suddenly started talking like a waterfall. His early talent for writing and drawing was always a little off from what the authorities would have liked to see in him. He couldn’t care less about German lessons, but instead drew caricatures and comics about the teaching staff under his desk. These stories became early bestsellers among his classmates. Later, he drew cartoons for magazines and books. For his book ‘Alles in Butter, Beuys’ (Everything’s Fine, Beuys), in which he presented Beuys’ art objects as caricatured recipes, the enthusiastic Joseph Beuys gave him a few of his drawings as a gift.
After spectacularly failing his first state law exam, he decided with relief never to set foot in the law school again. Thirty years later, however, his legal knowledge came in handy as a screenwriter for crime and legal series. To the horror of everyone who had imagined him in a double-breasted suit as a lawyer in a prestigious law firm, he preferred to study art in paint-splattered overalls and moved to New York, where he exhibited his abstract paintings and objects in galleries, most of which then went bankrupt. For a while, he taught painting at Princeton University. But when he realised that as a college professor he would spend most of his life surrounded by ageless eighteen-year-olds while he himself was constantly getting older, he fled the land where Groundhog Day never ends.
After ten years in America, he returned to Germany. In Berlin, he met Sue, who introduced him to the world of film. Motivated by a bet with her (‘I can do that too’), he wrote the screenplay ‘Der Cyberfactor’, which was never filmed, but earned him his first screenwriting commission. A crime thriller about art and murder starring the eccentric Christoph Waltz and cleverly decorated with his own pictures in the background, so that the film screening also became an art exhibition opening. This success opened the doors to television for him. In addition to crime series such as ‘Ein Fall für Zwei’ (A Case for Two), he wrote many thrillers and comedies in the following years. He wrote the first screenplays on his own, but Sue soon joined him, and the two enjoyed writing so much together that they got married.
More information about the exhibition Z22 GOES BIKINI can be found HERE.
WHEN?
Friday, 24. October 2025, 7 pm
WHERE?
CSR.ART im BIKINI BERLIN
Budapester Str. 38-50
On the ground floor, entrance towards Zoo Palast cinema, then immediately on the left
10787 Berlin-Charlottenburg
COSTS?
free admission
