with Alexander Leistner, Barbara Thériault and Manja Präkels

"When did we realise that we were living in a new country? And how? And how do we learn to breathe against the wind that brews ominously and presses into our lungs with sharp gusts?"

2024 saw the start of an unusual literary-sociological project. Three renowned authors, Manja Präkels, Tina Pruschmann and Barbara Thériault, were sent out as "Überlandschreiberinnen" (writers of the countryside) to explore the mood in East Germany and visualise hidden social rifts and tipping points. While Manja Präkels specifically visited civil society initiatives and hotspots in Brandenburg, Tina Pruschmann travelled to remote regions in Saxony's Ore Mountains by bike. Barbara Thériault joined a Thuringian newspaper as a local journalist, and Alexander Leistner followed mental lines of development, some of whose beginnings can be traced back to before 1989.
This resulted in literary reportages about the normalisation of right-wing extremist structures and narratives, threatened cultural associations and memorials, bizarre infrastructure projects in ruined landscapes. About people who look away and remain silent, and those who do their best every day to continue breathing against the wind in the raging storm of the revaluation of all values.