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"Dear Elisabeth, dear Karl ... That was all it said.
She looked at the checkered sheet of paper, at the sweeping letters, and paused.
She was cold on a mild May morning. ”The novel“ As if life were like this ”begins with the fragment of a farewell letter, in which the author Rainer Moritz, also known as the director of the Hamburg literary house, tells the life of the trained bookseller Lisa-Marie .
When the end is done, it's time to take stock.
The incomplete letter naturally arouses curiosity.
Lisa's life, however, and that is the feat that Moritz succeeds in, stands in the end in all its modest beauty and tragedy, in all the failure and success for many.
Booksellers in particular will love the book.
Whenever Lisa takes the wrong turn in her life, if she cannot make up her mind again, if she remains in the comfort zone in which she has established herself in the first decades, the reader is happy, the reader suffers too.
She likes, wants and cannot really commit herself.
Most of the time she prefers to read and lives as if life were like a novel.
The reader compares - with his own story as a reader, that of his own family, that of his friends, colleagues, acquaintances.
Because everyone knows at least one Lisa, the Lisa part in themselves and just has to recognize both of them while reading.
The reader from Northern Germany feels at home
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Together with her sister Anika, Lisa grew up around the 60s and 70s in her parents' house in a small village on the Schlei.
Father is a self-employed master electrician, mother does the household.
Childhood goes by in beautiful pictures, school days, youth with records by Joni Mitchell and Leonhard Cohen.
After school Lisa went to Hamburg, later to Berlin to study literature.
Your friends move to Eckernförde or Hanover.
The reader from Northern Germany feels at home, knows what the bath in the Schlei feels like and that the clocks stand still on Sunday at Großensee in Schleswig-Holstein.
Without a clear goal, without any particular ambition, Lisa rushes into life, gathers experience with boys, with her training as a bookseller, with her studies.
Finally she ends up in the sales department of a Hamburg publishing house.
Moritz moves narrative on safe terrain, as he knows his way around these worlds very well.
Lisa is very personable.
Their little quirks tend to be lovable, their preferences for good food, travel and books, books, books understandable.
She has an aversion to abbreviations, for example MoMa for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
She doesn't particularly appreciate psychologists either.
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Moritz authorial narrator lets Lisa look back at the age of thirty, forty and fifty.
Her attempts to take stock in the middle of life remain fragmentary and as strangely unsatisfactory for her as the dull balance in the end.
Due to the peculiarities of his protagonist, Moritz also draws a lively panorama of the epoch, which felt extremely Federal Republican.
That arouses nostalgia, as if you could actually better immerse yourself in the programming of a tube TV than in a film on the flat screen.
Lisa doesn't miss anything, doesn't care so much about anything that she would try to achieve a certain goal.
It defines itself consistently through what it does not want: children, the man for life, the house in the country.
She only meets the real lover after her 40th birthday.
However, she only meets him once a week, secretly.
The head of an advertising agency is married and has no plans to leave his wife and children.
If the affair, which is initially defined by sex and later by a deep relationship of trust, is enough for her, the hopeless grows too.
The life balance, enriched by a double life, is more reminiscent of double bookkeeping.
In the course of Lisa's life, the comfort zone imperceptibly changes to the Styxx, the river of death that Lisa cannot escape.
Just as little as the small, shabby, affordable rental apartments in which she lives with Bello, her cat.
With the Styxx in her, the reading suction grows, the novel becomes more thrilling.
Rainer Moritz: “As if life were like this”, Oktopus Verlag, 208 pages, 20 euros
Source: Oktopus Verlag
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Moritz put a quote from Albert Camus in front of the story, according to which “a person is always unknown to us and there is always something indissoluble in him that eludes us”.
With Jean-Paul Sartre, the other great French existentialist, it could be added that this principle also applies to self-reflection.
Shortly before the end of the story and the biography, when breast cancer hits Lisa as a stroke of fate a few years before the expected meager pension, everyone has a more or less wrong picture of her.
Their self-image also remains incomplete.
When the side effects of chemotherapy, which she never calls chemo, attack the mind and consciousness, Lisa decides to commit suicide.
Further drafts of the farewell letter to the parents are followed by the consequent step into eternity.
Lisa turns out to be an Anna Karenina of our day.
With regard to their affairs, the freedoms of Russian aristocrats in Tolstoy's time are surprisingly similar to the freedoms of today's booksellers.
A comparison is not necessary, but Moritz reads more loosely than Tolstoy and the scope of the two works is also different.
"Anna Karenina" in the current issue at Hanser has 1288 pages, "As if life were like this" at Oktopus in Kampaverlag has 208. The last one is the complete farewell letter that Lisa wrote to her parents.
Stefan Grund
Michael Göring conjures up friendship in “Dresden”
Fabian was 20 years old when he first traveled to the GDR from his home in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1975.
He would like to form his own picture of life in the East in order to counter the prejudices of his conservative father about the "Zone".
The Cologne student is staying with Gabi Gersberger in Dresden, who has been pen pals with his aunt Laura for decades.
Fabian is overwhelmed by the warmth and cordiality of the Gersbergers, next to Gabi and her husband Ekki there are daughter Anne (20), her little brother Kai (15) and Anne's friend Thorsten.
Michael Göring: "Dresden - A Family Novel", Osburg Verlag, 301 pages, 24 euros
Source: Osburg
Fabian is particularly fond of Anne.
He falls in love, but is soon overtaken by the realities that a divided Germany brings with it.
But next year he travels to Dresden again.
Anne is now married.
Fabian becomes her son's godfather.
Over the years, a deep friendship developed between him and the Gersbergers.
Author Michael Göring describes this process in his novel "Dresden - Roman einer Familie" until autumn 1989. This story is told chapter by chapter in alternation with a second one, which exclusively traces the events of October 1, 1989.
The authentic dialogues are Göring's particular strength
On this day Kai, who had to endure prison, violence and humiliation after an unsuccessful attempt to escape, is finally sitting on the train from Prague to Hof after his long-awaited departure.
Fabian, on the other hand, is on his way to East Berlin on October 1st to attend a concert by his godchild.
He will also meet Anne there.
And this meeting will be a very special one.
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Göring, chairman of the Hamburg-based Zeit Foundation, presents his fifth novel, “Dresden”.
The authentic dialogues are his particular strength.
Whether the good-natured Ekki with his “despite everything” attitude, his wife critical of the government, the awake Anne or the system-suffering Kai - Göring safely circumvents clichés and confidently leads his characters through the plot.
That too makes the story a successful novel, especially about friendship.
Katharina Jungclaus
Kirsten Boie deals with Nazi crimes in her youth book “Dunkelnacht”
“When I first found out about the Penzberg Murder Night a short time ago, I was shocked.
Not just about what happened there.
Also about the fact that I had never heard of it before - and nobody else I asked, ”explains the Hamburg children's and youth author Kirsten Boie in the epilogue to her new work“ Dark Night ”.
In the narrow volume, Boie recounts historical events for young readers aged 14 and over.
On the night of April 28-29, the Wehrmacht, the SS and the National Socialist underground organization Werwolf murdered 16 people in a small Bavarian town.
Penzberg thus became the scene of a so-called end-phase crime.
These were atrocities committed by the Nazis in the final weeks of World War II.
The victims were often concentration camp prisoners, forced laborers, prisoners of war or people accused of devastating military strength or desertion.
Using the example chosen, Boie reveals, layer by layer, the motives that haunted the murderers.
She lets her readers look into the heads of the perpetrators, in which crude ideas, hasty or blind obedience, feelings of revenge, fear, insecurity and inhumanity merge into a deadly mixture.
Boie also reveals the thoughts of the victims: Among other things, the readers get to know the social democratic mayor Hans Rummer, who was once deposed by the Nazis, who takes power again shortly before the expected invasion of the Americans in order to hand over Penzberg peacefully.
He also acts in the face of the impending devastation of the mining town, which is imminent in the wake of Hitler's Nero order: the Allies should only fall into the hands of unusable infrastructure.
The events are set in motion by a radio announcement in which the resistance movement Freiheitsaktion Bayern calls on all workers to protect their factories against sabotage by the Nazis.
Rummer and his upright, anti-fascist companions prevent the mine from being flooded - and will die the next night.
15-year-old Gustl, who Boie invented freely, also has a clear conviction.
The boy joins the werewolf - a group founded in 1944 by SS chief Heinrich Himmler to prevent the German population from cooperating with the occupiers.
"Gustl believes in the Führer, in the German Reich, the Aryan race," writes Kirsten Boie.
Above all, the misguided youth wants to “atone” for the supposed shame of his father, who was a communist in a concentration camp.
And so in the end Gustl helps to "switch off all suspicious elements".
Together with his power-drunk werewolf companions, he hangs innocent citizens - including a pregnant woman - on balconies and trees.
Kirsten Boie: "Dunkelnacht", Oetinger Verlag, 112 pages, 13 euros
Source: Oetinger Verlag
The author has added two more fictional characters Gustl's age to the story.
Schorsch and Marie, he the police chief's son, she the daughter of a Rummer comrade, are experiencing their first great love.
They happened to have to watch how the Wehrmacht under Lieutenant Colonel Berthold Ohm sentenced seven “rebellious” men to death by shooting and executed them.
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The young couple, initially insecure and filled with doubts, in the end decide in favor of humanity.
The two teenagers take on the role of role models, while Gustl acts as a deterrent example in historical events.
“I wanted to write about it,” says Boie about Penzberg, “especially at a time when the crimes of National Socialism are more and more forgotten among many young people (...), when the acts of the National Socialists even arouse admiration in certain groups . "
The book ends with the Americans moving into the small town.
The dead are buried, but the injustice continued: In the 1948 trials, Lieutenant Ohm was initially sentenced to death, but was finally acquitted, as were the other murderers from Penzberg.
“All of you, the perpetrators, were finally allowed back into your life,” says the epilogue.
Boie, born in 1950, has dealt with National Socialism and its consequences several times in her youth books - for example in the excellent novels "Ringel, Rangel, Rosen" and "Monis Jahr".
With “Dunkelnacht” she has made another convincing contribution to coming to terms with history, which should also be suitable for school reading.
Julika Pohle
Saša Stanišić invents incredibly beautiful adventure travel for his son
"Hey, hey, hey, I'm getting into a taxi ...", with these words every story in Saša Stanišić's picture book begins, consequently it is "Hey, hey, hey, taxi!" The author of the novels invented "Origin "And" Before the party "are the adventures for his son, because he travels so often, so he often gets into a taxi in Hamburg.
As soon as he is inside, he can experience something from zero to one hundred in no time, because Stanišić's linguistically overflowing, overflowing, overglowing imagination is limitless.
His taxi races in the intellectual fast lane without any resource restrictions.
The adventures are written the way you speak.
It's easy to read out, adapt for your own kids, after all, they should be heroes too, if they like.
And taxi drivers meet like the singing short-necked giraffe or Odjo Odjo, who is called that because he gets along well with this double word.
Saša Stanišić, Katja Spitzer: "Hey, hey, hey, taxi!"
Source: Katja Spitzer
Once Odjo Odjo goes to the animal day care center, where the educator, a fox, teaches the children to be smart as a fox.
Katja Spitzer painted the wonderful pictures for the exciting stories.
Also the little giant Riesling that the taxi sometimes turns into.
He prefers to carry passengers.
Incidentally, all stories end in a fairytale-like manner with the loving words: "and then back, back home, back to you."
Stefan Grund
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Source: Welt am Sonntag