with Alexander Leistner, Barbara Thériault and Manja Präkels
Extreme weather situations. Reports from a new Germany
with Alexander Leistner, Barbara Thériault and Manja Präkels
"When did we realize that we were living in a new country? And how? And how do we learn to breathe against the wind that is brewing ominously and pressing into our lungs with sharp gusts?"
2024 launched an unusual literary-sociological project. Three well-known authors, Manja Präkels, Tina Pruschmann and Barbara Thériault, were sent out as "Überlandschreiberinnen" (writers of the countryside) to explore the mood in East Germany and reveal hidden social fractures and tipping points. While Manja Präkels specifically visited civil society initiatives and hotspots in Brandenburg, Tina Pruschmann traveled to remote regions in Saxony's Ore Mountains by bike. Barbara Thériault joined a Thuringian newspaper as a local journalist, and Alexander Leistner followed lines of mental development, some of which began before 1989.
This resulted in literary reports on the normalization of right-wing extremist structures and narratives, threatened cultural associations and memorials, bizarre infrastructure projects in ruined landscapes. About people who look away and remain silent, and those who do their best every day to keep breathing against the wind in the raging storm of the revaluation of all values.
