Sold out: Reading & Talk: Volker Weidermann - If I were a cloud

"I have to rely on miracles": Mascha Kaléko's trip 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.

Volker Weidermann was born in Darmstadt and studied political science and German literature in Heidelberg and Berlin. After working as a journalist at "taz", "FAS" and "Spiegel", he headed the features section of "ZEIT" with Christine Lemke-Matwey and is now her cultural correspondent. His book publications include "Das Buch der verbrannten Bücher", "Ostende" and "Träumer". Weidermann was also the host of the "Literary Quartet" on ZDF for five years.