There is a building on Stresemannstraße that was designed to hold difficult memories in place — to fix them to walls, to vitrines, to carefully lit panels. The Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation opened in the listed Deutschlandhaus near Anhalter Bahnhof in 2021 as a space for exactly this: the orderly contemplation of disorder, the archiving of uprootedness. On 1 April 2026, the International Literature Festival Berlin will do something slightly subversive with that architecture. It will fill it with people who refuse to sit still.

The format is deceptively simple. Seven poets and authors — Volha Hapeyeva, Ahmed Awny, Mazda Mehrgan, Hekma Yagoub, Ali Alzaeem, Mariia Kaziun, and Yasser Niksada — present texts and poems at four different locations scattered across the Documentation Centre. Between intervals, audiences move freely between spaces and presentations, choosing their own routes through the readings. Nobody sits in one place for the duration. The literature migrates, and so do the listeners.

The concept of wandering readings is not new to the ilb, but this particular iteration, staged inside a museum dedicated to forced migration, carries an obvious and deliberate resonance. The ambulatory format — bodies in transit between stations of language — enacts, however gently, the subject matter it addresses. Exile, displacement, the loss of a fixed position from which to speak. The audience gets a faint, aestheticised version of that disorientation: which room do I go to next, what am I missing elsewhere, how do I orient myself? The difference between reading about displacement while seated in a lecture hall and reading about it while physically moving through a space designed to document it is the difference between information and experience.

The lineup is built around writers whose biographies run directly through the themes the Documentation Centre usually presents behind glass. Volha Hapeyeva is a Belarusian poet, translator, and linguist who left Minsk and now lives in Germany; her work — particularly her essay collection *Die Verteidigung der Poesie in Zeiten dauernden Exils* — interrogates what happens to language itself when it is uprooted from its context. Hapeyeva has become one of the more visible voices in the German-language literary ecosystem working explicitly on exile and mother tongue loss, with coverage in Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and multiple ilb appearances since 2022. Ahmed Awny and Hekma Yagoub bring perspectives rooted in Arabic-language literary traditions; Mariia Kaziun writes from the ongoing catastrophe of Ukrainian displacement; Yasser Niksada carries the weight of Afghan exile. These are not symbolic appointments. Each of these writers has produced work that emerges directly from the rupture of forced migration — not as theme but as condition.

Mazda Mehrgan occupies a slightly different position. Born in Iran, raised in Germany, he works across poetry, essays, and translation, and his writing often interrogates the space between cultures that an exile inhabits permanently — not as a station on the way to assimilation, but as a territory in its own right. His presence alongside writers with more recent displacement experiences creates a useful tension in the programme: exile is not one story. It is not even one temporality. Some of these writers are processing events from the last three years. Others are mapping a lifetime of in-betweenness.

Then there is the Exile Poetry Dispenser — a detail that sounds like it could tip into kitsch but, traced back through the ilb's programming history, functions as something more considered. Twenty authors contribute poems to a vending-machine-style apparatus that offers printed texts to passersby. The device literalises a question that runs through all exile literature: what survives the crossing? What can be carried? A poem is almost infinitely portable — and the dispenser makes that fact both absurd and tender, a machine dispensing the most human of artefacts, language compressed into its most essential form, offered to strangers.

I should note what I cannot do here. I cannot tell you what it feels like to stand in that building while Volha Hapeyeva reads in Belarusian, or whether the ambient sounds of one presentation bleed into another, creating accidental palimpsests of language. Information on the specific staging and spatial design of this wandering readings event is limited to a brief programme description; I'm working with the format's logic rather than detailed production notes.

What I can do is place this event in a pattern. The ilb, now in its twenty-fifth edition, has for the past decade increasingly moved beyond the standard festival model of author-reads-from-book-in-auditorium. The festival's international network — including membership in the Word Alliance, linking it to Edinburgh, Jaipur, Melbourne, and others — signals a programme that thinks of literature as fundamentally transnational. But the wandering readings format pushes further, away from the cosmopolitan showcase model and towards something more spatially and politically specific. Placing exile literature inside a documentation centre is not the same as placing it in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The venue is not a neutral container. It is an argument.

The Documentation Centre's permanent exhibition focuses on forced migrations driven by political, ethnic, and religious persecution, with the displacement of Germans during and after the Second World War as a particular focal point. This institutional focus has been both praised for its seriousness and critiqued for its framing — German expellee history remains politically charged, and the centre has navigated that charge carefully since its 2021 opening. Staging contemporary exile literature within this space creates a layering effect: the twentieth-century history on the walls meets twenty-first-century testimony in the air. The audience walks between them, literally. The past and the present share a floor plan.

There is a specificity to the Anhalter Bahnhof neighbourhood that matters here. This was once one of Berlin's great railway stations, a departure point and arrival point, a place defined by transit. The station was largely destroyed in the war; its ruin still stands nearby. The Deutschlandhaus has itself been repurposed, recontextualised, made to mean something different from what it originally meant. Everything in this area is already about displacement — of function, of meaning, of people. The ilb is not imposing a theme on the venue. The venue has been waiting for this programme.

Seven writers, four rooms, twenty poems in a machine, and an audience asked to walk between them. The format refuses the comfort of sitting still, of receiving a programme in the order someone else decided. It asks instead for a small act of choice and movement — trivial compared to the journeys these writers describe, but structurally honest about what displacement does to narrative. There is no single sequence. There is no fixed seat. You arrive somewhere in the middle and you piece together what you can.