The Germans move to the country.

Just recently, a study was published again, according to which numerous city dwellers have decided to leave the metropolises.

Big cities are no longer a place of longing, neither in nor after the pandemic, it said.

But even before the pandemic, the big cities had long since ceased to be places of longing.

The new place of longing is the village.

It seems that most of the townspeople would prefer to move to the village by now.

Because it's cheaper.

Because it's quieter.

In the case of the upper middle class: because an apartment in the city seems too mundane, so it is simply not enough.

Julia Encke

Responsible editor for the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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When the townspeople can't make it to the country, they constantly toy with the idea of ​​maybe moving out next year, make plans that they discard, and are tirelessly looking for real estate in the outskirts of the big cities in which they live.

You are intoxicated by the idea of ​​combining the ideal of a simple life with an expedient or extremely promising investment.

Or they read books that deal with their longing and those who are already where they want to be;

Village fairy tales, village dreams, village thrillers: the whole new German village literature.

It started with "Unterleuten"

Because you can no longer escape this village literature at all. The village - and that says a lot not only about the Germans, but also about German literature - is the real star of many contemporary novels that are currently being published. And that doesn't necessarily mean only thrillers like David Safier's "Miss Merkel - Murder in the Uckermark". Rather, the village hype in literature has continued since July Zeh's novel “Unterleuten”, the novel from 2016 set in a fictional village in Prignitz in western Brandenburg, in which the author tells from changing perspectives of winners and losers of the Wende, of locals, Capitalists and city refugees who moved from Berlin. A manageable society, between whose protagonists a conflict arises when a wind farm is to be built in the immediate vicinity of the village.

"It could be that society novels are only possible as village novels," said a literary critic when "Unterleuten" appeared on Deutschlandfunk. A sentence that was thought to be completely crazy at the time. Why should that be so? Since when was the literary world of all places a village? Apparently there were enough writers and publishers who wanted to see it the same way: Sarah Kuttner published her novel “Kurt” in 2019, in which a couple goes through a difficult time, but “Brandenburg love” gives consolation, long avenues of trees symbolizing Paths of life and the neighbors who eat wild boar sausage become the embodiment of romantic originality.