The writer Birgit Vanderbeke, born in 1956, had her breakthrough right away with her debut story “Das Muschelessen”.
First she won the Ingeborg Bachmann competition with it, then the book published by Rotbuch sold brilliantly.
Rightly so, because the description of a family meal that was constantly delayed by the father was not only an example of early feminist self-empowerment of an author, but also hit the nerve of the audience in the year of reunification with a German-German component of family life.
But the success of the book turned out to be a curse, because Vanderbeke could only build on it once with the story "Alberta receives a lover".
In the year of their publication, 1997, she received the very prestigious Kranichsteiner Literature Prize for her complete works - when she was just in her early forties.
After that it became quieter about the master of the small form, two novels went almost unnoticed in the end.
The author, however, remained true to her feather-light narrative style and occasionally scoffed at the laws of the German literary industry - from her adopted home in the south of France.
Birgit Vanderbeke died there on December 24th at the age of sixty-five.