Can two halves of homelands become one?

When the muezzin sings, Huzur buries her head under her pillow. When her colleagues at the school in Wedding reduce her to her Turkish heritage, she comes to class wearing a headscarf - and is suspended. When a strange man at the ...

"About all the good reasons to die and all the much betterreasons to stay alive."

At the age of 70, Hella wants to die. In Switzerland, in a hospital. And so she sets depression. out on her journey. Her aging Passat will manage this final trip. But then, just as she gets ...

The tale of a friend rediscovered at the last minute

A phone call from the hospice: Yigal, a childhood friend that Lizzie Doron hasn't seen for forty years, asks her to be the last person to visit him. But why her of all people? Yigal's experiences in the Israeli army ...

Ten Case Histories of denunciation by women in the Third Reich

Judas as a woman, women as traitors - in this historical study, Helga Schubert tells the stories of ten women who became informers during the Third Reich. Using court records, the author reconstructs the fatal ...

A German mental hospital and the delucional conceprt of "unworthy life"

In 1941, in a Schwerin mental hospital, 179 patients were labeled as "unworthy of life" and murdered in the context of the Nazi euthanasia program. The program files remained under lock and key even ...

Not every dream that has been carried through the years can be fulfilled in the here and now

Tomorrow everything will be different, or it won't matter anymore. That sums up the lives of the residents of the run-down spa town of Villrath. Ever since the local therapeutic ...

Buildings can be demolished and rebuilt; memories can not

Jan and his parents speak very little with eachother and certainly not about the past. It isn't until Mr. Kern appears that the family's fragile equilibrium begins to unravel. What kind of relationship did Jan's ...

Art and life: tragic and funny

Art and life - when one throws us off track, the other puts us back on the rails. Or is it the other way around?
In the first of three stories, a dissident author retreats from the public eye in order to save his life and finds in the art ...

The true, world-spanning story of an extraordinary book

Two men, two centuries - bound together by one extraordinary book. Thomas Bridges, the author, grows up as the foster son of a British missionary at the end of the world, in Tierra del Fuego, among the children of the ...

A century and a life - transformed into literature

As Helga Schubert's mother explains to her daughter, she has accomplished three acts of heroism in her lifetime: refusing to abort her daughter, taking her along when fleeing from enemy troops during World War II, and not ...

Violence of the past, love of the present

When Nike leaves her apartment in the Berlin-Mitte district, she has to pass her great-grandmother's Stolperstein. Stones like this are small memorials for the victims of persecution and murder during the Third Reich, and there are many of ...

A story of human longing and failure, of German history, and the ethics of science

Against his father's will, Hermann Oberth moves to Göttingen in 1920 in order to study physics - the most exciting science of his age in the most exciting city there is. Hermann wants to turn the ...