Shida Bazyar - "Die Lücken". Book premiere

"Whoever believes in chronology also believes in explanations."

What is Heimesbach? Once a sleepy village in the Hunsrück, then connected to the wider country by rail, once home to Jewish families, then a model Nazi village. A place where silence reigned for decades after 1945 - where perpetrators and bystanders commemorated the deported without shame, and where victims of later wars could simultaneously find refuge. In Heimesbach there are ghosts who see all of this: the past and the present, the secrets and what lies in plain sight, the living, the displaced, the dead.

In "Die Lücken", Shida Bazyar surveys 90 years of German history. The novel is as fragmented as that history itself: in countless mosaic-like episodes, we leap across the decades between the 1920s and the 2010s. Layer by layer, Bazyar exposes how ambivalent what we call "Heimat" really is - because this barely tangible construct is shaped not, as we tell ourselves, by collective narratives and memories, but decisively by the fault lines of guilt we dare not speak about.

Moderation: Björn Jager. Entry: € 6,-/9,-/12,- (pay as you wish)

Shida Bazyar was born in 1988 in Hermeskeil, studied literary writing in Hildesheim, and spent many years working in youth education. Her debut novel "Nachts ist es leise in Teheran" (2016) has been translated into multiple languages and won several awards, including the Ulla-Hahn-Autorenpreis, the Uwe-Johnson-Förderpreis, and a nomination for the International Booker Prize. "Drei Kameradinnen" (2021) was longlisted for the German Book Prize and has just been adapted for film. In 2023 she received the Ernst-Toller-Preis.