Lesung und Gespräch | Judith Hermann und Sebastian Guggolz | Ich möchte zurückgehen in der Zeit
Judith Hermann follows the traces of her grandfather in "Ich möchte zurückgehen in der Zeit," who was stationed with the SS in the Polish town of Radom during World War II. She connects her writing with his long-denied history, traveling from Poland to visit her sister in Naples, exploring the remembering and forgetting of subsequent generations.
In between and undertones, Judith Hermann explores what has been repressed, the gaps in our society. As magically as she does magnetically, she narrates how fragile we settle into our lives – and also shows what beauty can hide within it.
Judith Hermann was born in 1970 in Berlin. Her debut "Sommerhaus, später" (1998) received extraordinary resonance. In 2003, the short story collection "Nichts als Gespenster" followed. Some of these stories were adapted for the cinema in 2007. In 2009, "Alice" was published, five stories that were internationally celebrated. In 2014, Judith Hermann released her first novel, "Aller Liebe Anfang." In 2016, the stories "Lettipark" followed, which were awarded the Danish Blixen Prize for short stories. Judith Hermann has been honored with numerous awards for her work, including the Kleist Prize and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. In 2021, the novel "Daheim" was published, which was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, and for which Judith Hermann received the Bremen Literature Prize in 2022. Most recently, in 2023, "Wir hätten uns alles gesagt" was published by S. FISCHER, based on the Frankfurt Poetics Lectures that Judith Hermann gave in the spring of 2022. For this, she received the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize. The author lives and writes in Berlin.
Sebastian Guggolz, born in 1982, studied art history and German studies in Hamburg. He then worked as an editor for the publishing house Matthes & Seitz Berlin. In 2014, he founded Guggolz Verlag, which specializes in new translations of works by forgotten authors from the first half of the 20th century from Northern and Eastern Europe, including the new publication of Boris Poplawski. In 2025, he was elected the new president of the Association of German Book Trade.