Sold out: Reading & Talk: Hanns-Josef Ortheil - Suspension railroads

Finding your way in life through writing: Hanns-Josef Ortheil's great new novel about a childhood in post-war Wuppertal

At the end of the 1950s, six-year-old Josef moves with his parents from Cologne to Wuppertal into a house full of railroad workers' families. He is a very introverted loner who would prefer to just play the piano. He had to drop out of school in Cologne, but in his new home he makes a second attempt. When he meets Mücke, the daughter of the greengrocer across the street, a close friendship develops between the two children, which helps him to overcome his inhibitions. Gradually, he also opens up to other people, such as the fathers of the Order of the Cross, who teach him to read aloud and sing, or a youth coach who trains him in cross-country skiing. But it is writing down stories about suspension railway flights along the Wupper, expeditions with bizarre animals in the zoo or adventurous fights with gangs of youths in a nearby wooded area that gives him the strongest support. Hanns-Josef Ortheil tells a touchingly intense story of the internal and external reconstruction of post-war western Germany. "Schwebebahnen" is the story of an initially autistic boy who discovers his own imaginary worlds, carried by music. At the same time, it is a grand panorama of a deeply traumatized society in which people lead a quiet life scarred by the Second World War and still act fearfully in the face of another impending war.

Hanns-Josef Ortheil was born in Cologne. He is a writer, pianist and professor of creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim. For many years, he has been one of the most popular and most widely read contemporary German authors. His work has been awarded many prizes, including the Thomas Mann Prize, the Nicolas Born Prize, the Stefan Andres Prize and the Hannelore Greve Literature Prize, and has been translated into over twenty languages.