A spoon, stuck handle-first into a bowl of soup. A mountain, standing on its head.

Falschrum Books is a not-for-profit publisher, operating at the intersection of art, literature, and research. Fostering collaborations between artists and authors of different social and linguistic backgrounds, Falschrum seeks to positively influence an ever-more-polarized cultural landscape, too often dominated by the demands of narrow national and economic self-interests. Founded in 2019 in Berlin, by a poet and an artist-publisher-scholar with a shared devotion to cultivating understanding between Arabic-, German-, and English-speaking audiences, Falschrum has grown into a publishing collective that concerns itself with migration, displacement, borders, transitions, movement, loss, arrival, and new beginnings.

Collaboration is a core value of Falschrum. We work to find points of connection between textual, visual, and tactile modes of communication as they come together in the book object. This kind of working together, across languages, genres, and geographic borders, extends into the physical space of events in the Falschrum office, where we host readings and participate in neighborhood festivals. Letting writers, editors, designers, and artists bring themselves into a shared publishing process, and a space to present the fruits of their collaborations, we create not only books, as commodities, but a dialogue and social life that cuts across the stultifying, stereotyping tendency in many “cross-cultural” or “multicultural” projects. In contrast to the short-term structure of most institutional, project-based work, this often leads to long-lasting collaborative relations, even community.

Some writing is, or longs to be, an object. Some objects, which are books, bridge distances. This is a reversal of logic, a reversal of time—publishing, which was once making something as available as it could be, becomes an anchoring into a physical object, a requirement for presence that pulls us out of the fiction of an infinite digital availability. We make bi-lingual publications, books you can read from left to right, and from right to left. Books you feel invited into, even if you cannot read half the text. This, too, is a kind of movement; this too is a way that something becomes at once accessible and transformed from its former language, its former life.

While some members of Falschrum are, or used to be, “academics” in some sense, we all share a desire to undermine the strategies of knowledge production and dissemination that are objectifying, authoritarian, and dull, and which tend to dominate academic discourses. Falschrum, therefore, is a publisher dedicated to setting-upside-down as a way of putting things right.
 
Nothing is native.
Nothing is fixed.
What you are looking for is on the underside.
And when it’s overturned, it’s on the underside again.