b. April 19, 1949, Berlin (Germany)

Senior Lecturer for public and private institutions (University of Milan, Siena, Bergamo, Goethe-Institut Milan), German literature and linguistics. Since 2002 Coordinator Bachelor Studies in Intercultural & -linguistic Communication, Scuola Superiore per Mediatori linguistici, Dipartimento di lingue (Fondazione Milano). Since 2004/05 Coordinator Master course in Translation for Visual Arts.
Translations from English and Italian, among them 2004:"MoMa Highlights", Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
1985 Magister Artium (Germanistik/Politologie), Freie Universitt Berlin
Since 1986 publications, conferences, papers on Literature, Linguistics and Visual Arts.
1993: 1st One Person Show "Macere", Libreria Unione, introduced by Generalkonsul Dr. Michael Engelhard, Milan.
1996/2000 Curator of Art exhibitions (among them "Artisti di passaggio", City of Monteriggioni (Siena), 1999) and Art Director of Spazio dArte/ Rapsodia CafÃ© and Backstage Gallery, Milan. 2001 Curator of the Art-Music-Literature-Event "Romantik 2001", Bergamo/Milan.
2000 "Su e giÃ¹", Cover picture, novel by Franca Cavagnoli, "Una pioggia bruciante", Frassinelli Editore, Milan; Cover picture "berlin du deutsche deutsche frau", essay by Virginia Cisotti e.a.,"Tra malinconia e utopia", Selene Editore, Milan; 2004 "CaffÃ© di Portogallo", Cover picture, Congress documents "Traduzione e Riforma universitaria", German Academic Exchange Service DAAD/Foundation Milano.

Publications (vol.)

Last volumes "VorwÃ¤rts und nicht vergessen. Kleiene Geschichte der DDR-Literatur, 2009, , "Il cielo una volta diviso. Saggi su letteratura e cultura della DDR", 2009

Wandering between Germany and Italy, Berlin and Milan, Lombardy and Tuscany and the North of Germany, looking out for a place to build up my life, my love, my art. Neither fatherland nor mother country, no hometown any longer yet I dont feel homeless at all. My Heimat: a provisional abode. Real, virtual, global - spaces where my nomadic soul and body will create that clever coincidence called romantic Lebenskunst, the pinnacle of all arts.
Due to dreams and desire, migration is my state of mind, my way of being, the only chance for aesthetic creation, to realise a sacred void that is always borderline, between & beyond trash and pornography, anorexia and bulimia.

The current power behind the crusades against sexuality, eroticism and pornography stays ever less concealed. The human being, his body and his mind are ever more often the objects of desecration and profanation in the name of some god. History has made a sacrosanct work of the obscene; in its shadows there flows the brute and the ugly reality of the daily warfare under the banner of the culture of death.
Because it severely offends the sense of decency, the obscene is banished through the prohibition of censorship: by locking out what is presumed to be immoral Goyas pinturas obscenas, de Sades La nouvelle Justine, Ofilis Holy Virgin Mary and Toscanis gay pictures on the one hand and by deeply and consistently offending the sense of aesthetics on the other, cultural hegemony establishes the taste of the moment, or what should be thought of as vulgar and provocative.

So what remains that we hold sacred? A rhetorical and non-rhetorical question. There is certainly no hope of finding the answer in the supermarket of the beautiful, between face-lifted sparkling aesthetics and the kitsch. But striving for intellectual and sensual research, spurred by that deep feeling of Romantic yearning, could help us to tread the path of human wisdom which, to quote Novalis, leads us home, always to the sacrality of the sublime, to the innate beauty of things and people, to the beauty created in art and by art, in life and by life.

(personal website) . (current project)

Paul Kroker