"I need beauty. The solace of beauty. Because when I see, hear, read, feel beauty, I believe in possibilities. In paths, spaces, somersaults."

Gabriele von Arnim

Finding solace. In a world that can be so overwhelming, frightening, demanding. Finding solace in the sensation of beauty because that, Gabriele von Arnim says, is nothing less than self-preservation. This is the subject of her recently published book "Der Trost der Schönheit. A Quest" (Rowohlt). At the end of the special exhibition "Consolation – Tracing A Human Need," the Berlin author and journalist will be a guest at the Museum for Sepulchral Culture and will read from it.

"The Solace of Beauty" is a dazzling combination of autobiographical and essayistic narration: not a cultural history that seeks to hem in its subject with theory, but a literary search for clues. Gabriele von Arnim asks about the forms and effects of what we call beautiful, about happiness and the dark sides of sensibility. The search leads back to childhood, to a girl from a coldly managed house who must first learn to feel in order to be able to perceive beauty – for a comforting moment – in all its finite fullness.

After the Spiegel bestseller "Life is a temporary state" a new moving report from the inside. A book that widens our view of the world around us and its transience, and that gives us courage to endure ambivalence.

Gabriele von Arnim was born in Hamburg in 1946. She studied, earned her doctorate, and lived for ten years as a freelance journalist in New York. She then wrote for DIE ZEIT and SÜDDEUTSCHE, BR and WDR, among others, and worked as a presenter for ARTE, SDR/SWR and SF. She writes reviews for newspapers and radio, moderates readings, has published several books and lives in Berlin.

The exhibition will be open until 7 p.m. on October 29, 2023.
In addition to the Consolation exhibition, the exhibition R.I.(a)P also ends on this day.