A girl named Johnny

Early on, Joana Wolkenzin knows that she is different. She spends hours reading and learns song lyrics by heart. As she grows older, she falls in love with both boys and girls. In the No Man's Land of Western Pomerania in the 1990s, she gives herself a new name: ...

Lorenz, a former librarian and cinema usher, is now pushing 30 and working in a copy shop. One day he holds onto one of several copies of a diary he is binding for a diplomat. He gives it unread to his girlfriend Iris, a substitute teacher, so they can read it together. The diary is the ...

Western Pomeranian, 1999, in the small village of Bresekow. When old Frau Hanske dies, her daughter Ingrid flies in for the funeral with her family from Ireland. Ingrid had fled Bresekow many years ago. Her visit brings about many changes in the village, raising questions old and new, ...

Julius is the story of a young man striking out on his own. It's also the story of the eponymous protagonist's friendship with Martin, a sports-mad French student. And it's the moving and tragic love story of Julius and Jadwiga, and Julius's only seemingly ...

The Boysen family celebrates life
During a major celebration at Tide House - Inge Boysen is turning 80, while her granddaughter Inka is turning 18 - Fortune's Comet soars over the North Sea island. Inge, her children, and her grandchildren become Fortune's travellers. Enno is ...

"The dizzying comings and goings in our family started with a death announcement and an unheralded storm. Full moon and high tide, snow and storm, brothers and sisters, lovers and unborn children were thrown together without forewarning. Overnight, our house was transformed into an Arctic ...

In the wake of the unexpected death of a close friend, 45-year-old Thomas Bachmann feels compelled to re-examine his own life: his thriving psychotherapy practice, his marriage to Veronica and his relationship with his teenage children. When he meets the attractive, enigmatic Florentine, ...

If buildings could talk… One century, two families, and a house in the heart of Berlin packed with history

Elsa, the daughter of a shop assistant, and Bernhard, a carpenter's son, were both born in 1929 - on the opening day of the Jonass department store at 1 Torstrasse. Their ...

As a child, the bananas from the supermarket were much cooler than the apples grown locally, but as an adult, Christine Zeile wanted to rediscover the taste of long-vanished, older fruit varieties. Fruits and vegetables from her own garden without chemicals: That couldn't be all that hard, right?

Thinking can be fun

God and man, nature, space and time, insight and self-knowledge, society and the state, logic, ethics and morality-these are issues that have preoccupied people since time immemorial. Forays into philosophy can enhance our perspective on life's problems and ...

An original thinker and a great teacher of wisdom

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 -1860) was only 25 years old when he published his first major work, "The World as Will and Idea". He was a cosmopolitan thinker whose interests outside of philosophy included ...

No sooner had German-speaking women writers begun to make their mark on the literary scene at the start of the 20th century than their way was already being barred by the Nazis' cultural policy. As a result of their political convictions, their style of writing, the way they presented ...