Volker Weidermann

In the organizer's words:

"If I were a cloud: Mascha Kaléko and the journey of her life"

Reading & discussion

"I have to rely on miracles": Mascha Kaléko's journey to Germany

January 1956: Seventeen years after Mascha Kaléko left Nazi Germany at the last minute, she returns. It is a journey into the past - combined with the anxious question of whether it can also be a journey into the future.

She travels to Berlin, the city where she had been happy, where she had become successful as a poet, which she loved, and across the whole country for a whole year. Almost every day she sends letters to New York, to her husband, the love of her life, and tells of fabulous successes, a miracle in Berlin, abysses, of an old, new country.

Volker Weidermann writes about a single year and reveals an entire German-Jewish life. It is the story of a poet in whose humour, wit and melancholy we recognize ourselves.

Moderator: Thomas Böhm (rbb)

"Volker Weidermann succeeds very well in showing Mascha Kaléko's inner turmoil, her love, especially for Berlin (...) And alongside this, there is always the horror of how many people still felt that National Socialism had not been defeated in 1956." Thomas Böhm, rbb radioeins

"Honestly? I envy anyone who hasn't yet read Volker Weidermann's magnificent portrait of the persecuted German poet Mascha Kaléko!" Maxim Biller, Süddeutsche Zeitung

A joint event of the Waschhaus Potsdam, the Brandenburgisches Literaturbüro and the Literaturladen Wist.

Price information:

plus advance booking fees