HEIKE GEISSLER reads "Michaela Kohlhaas"

Heike Geißler's novel "Michaela Kohlhaas" is a bold rewriting of Heinrich von Kleist's famous novella. In Kleist's version, wounded justice drives the horse trader Michael Kohlhaas to bloody revenge. Two hundred years later, his vendetta becomes a model and instruction manual for Michaela Kohlhaas, a cemetery administrator's deputy - a raging, stinking, tender woman, a great lover who wants not merely improvement but restitution, atonement, and an entirely different arrangement of the world.

Where Michael murders and plunders, Michaela acts through words: escalation, exaggeration, sabotage, and spectacle. Like a supposed witch, she wanders the land cursing - and discovers that being a woman is a disadvantage, and so is defending herself. Even when the whole world declares her mad, she marches "with flying colours" toward her end, hoping for a happy ending yet sensing that such a thing may not exist.

Heike Geißler was born in 1977 in Riesa and lives in Leipzig. She also works interdisciplinarily in various formations (Sabotique and George Bele) and recently served as Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence at the Free University of Berlin. In 2025, she received the Klopstock Prize for new literature, the Heinrich Böll Prize, and the Bavarian Book Prize.

Reading: Heike Geißler | Moderation: Katrin Schumacher | Publisher: Suhrkamp | Duration: approximately 90 minutes

This event is a warm-up to the Literatur JETZT! festival (23-27 September 2026) and will be recorded for the MDR-KULTUR broadcast "Unter Büchern unterwegs". The broadcast date will be announced in September. A collaboration between Societaetstheater, the Literatur JETZT! festival, and Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk.