Spacemen
Fiction, Literary Fiction
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 mother have with Mr. Kern’s father? And how are the Kerns involved with the art of Georg Baselitz? Jan begins to delve back farther and farther into the silence of several generations. He immerses himself in the history of the Baselitz brothers and of his parents, and eventually comes to the realization that the present doesn’t solely consist of just his own history.
Gentle and full of empathy, Lukas Rietzschel paints an impressive picture of individuals who have been shaped by major social and political upheavals - and of the wounds that are handed down generation to generation and never seem to heal.
• The story of two families in Eastern Germany, from the GDR period through the present day - a haunting reflection on memory, art and the aftermath of things
• “Lukas Rietzschel counts as one of the most important young authors from the East.” Die Zeit
Lukas Rietzschel, born in 1994 in Räckelwitz in eastern Saxony, now lives in Görlitz. His debut novel Mit der Faust in die Welt schlagen was released in 2018 and became a bestseller that was also produced as a stage play.
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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 mother have with Mr. Kern’s father? And how are the Kerns involved with the art of Georg Baselitz? Jan begins to delve back farther and farther into the silence of several generations. He immerses himself in the history of the Baselitz brothers and of his parents, and eventually comes to the realization that the present doesn’t solely consist of just his own history.
Gentle and full of empathy, Lukas Rietzschel paints an impressive picture of individuals who have been shaped by major social and political upheavals - and of the wounds that are handed down generation to generation and never seem to heal.
• The story of two families in Eastern Germany, from the GDR period through the present day - a haunting reflection on memory, art and the aftermath of things
• “Lukas Rietzschel counts as one of the most important young authors from the East.” Die Zeit