When Petra Hardt is in a concert at the Alte Oper, which she can do more often now, it may feel different to others.

A little more at home.

Especially when the Alte Oper is celebrating the anniversary of its reconstruction.

After all, Hardt contributed to this.

As a quintan of the Gagern-Gymnasium, she wandered through Bornheim with the collecting can for weeks to collect for the reconstruction of the opera house.

As one of the 500 children who had collected the most for the reconstruction, she took part in the award ceremony with a gala concert.

Eva-Maria Magel

Head of culture editor Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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She jokes that the first prize in the fundraising competition, a VW Beetle, went to the sons of a head doctor, who collected very profitably in the Sachsenhausen villa district, while in Bornheim, where there were few opera fans at the time, they walked up and down the stairs for every penny not to show their merit, it's part of the atmosphere of that time.

The memories of Frankfurt in the sixties have sparked much fresher memories.

Of all the education available to the grandchildren in distant Berkeley.

In the good year in which, because of Corona, she had not been able to spend long phases there as usual, in which the longing has become bigger than ever, Petra Hardt wrote a narrow band between memories, essays and scenes that said is called like what it was able to do before Corona forced it on many: “loving away”. She got the term from her sociologist friend Ulrich Beck.

“Falling away starts with Skype and continues at airports,” says Hardt.

And because she has always been a Skype and travel grandmother with her first two grandchildren in America, she can describe what makes the difference when force majeure rather than a successful professional life ensures that you are not always with the Family can be.

Which is so different from your own childhood.

And in the other country.

In Berkeley she learns how different spaces and times affect her identity.

As a family person, but also a European and humanities scholar, book person through and through.

And, born in 1954, part of the older generation.

In the service of the best

“Fernlieben” was published as an island book by one of the two publishers, whose success Hardt was responsible for for a good 30 years. As the head of law at Suhrkamp Verlag, the Frankfurt-based, trained Romanist, has guarded and increased the publisher's treasures. She has long been a well-networked legend in the international publishing scene. “I had to put myself in the service of the best,” she says simply when she talks about her career. Which also explains that, in this profession, she never had the need or the time to write herself, except for a handbook on the international trade in rights.

Initially unwilling, Hardt moved to Berlin with Suhrkamp in 2010, now she misses the bustling and cultural climate of the capital.

And ties in with the cultural scene and friendships in Rhine-Main.

“I have to reclaim the space,” she says, and the football fan, who was with his father in the Waldstadion as a child, also shines through.

Corona shifts the coordinates

In retirement, she moved back to her childhood area. From Mannheim, her current place of residence, she flies regularly to Frankfurt, her hometown. One son lives here, but the greater part of the family will be south-west in future. That too, she suspects, is an effect of the pandemic that shifted the coordinates. Otherwise the eldest son and his family might not have decided to come back to Germany after a good decade in the United States.

And Hardt, who for four decades, first at Athenäum and Luchterhand and then, since 1994, at Suhrkamp, ​​was responsible for international rights and licenses, which ensured that German authors were distributed all over the world and international fiction and non-fiction books for Suhrkamp Verlag is now the author herself, represented by her successor in the legal department.

In 2019 she said goodbye to the book fair with Aplomb. A joke, almost that she had to experience in her first year of retirement that the rights rally, where she, a petite and extremely energetic person looked like a queen of meetings, did not take place as usual due to Corona. Now she writes “just like that”, short stories arise, a novel project, her agent reacts extremely positively. She is "very grateful that Insel Verlag has published this very personal book". But now it's enough with autobiographical writing, she adds in her witty way that shapes her writing. It is also enough with “falling in love” itself. A few more months and all three of Petra Hardt's children will be back in Germany. And she won't, as she usually does several times a year,fly out of Frankfurt yourself or meet someone there. Only once will she soon be standing at the terminal in her hometown, with flowers for her children and grandchildren.