Harald Jähner: Höhenrausch - as part of the 25th Westerwälder Literaturtage

Germany, 1918. The First World War is over, revolution sweeps the country, democracy prevails. At the same time, a wave of liberated lifestyles begins to roll. Everything is supposed to change from the ground up: the "New Woman", the "New Man", "New Living", "New Thinking". When the economy picks up in the mid-twenties, Germany becomes a different country. Women take to racing tracks and tennis courts, go out alone in the evenings, cut their hair short. Jähner tells the story of the invention of leisure, of boxing halls and dance palaces, of the hotspots of the New Age - the department store as a promise of happiness, the street as a battleground. So much of it feels strikingly familiar today. Harald Jähner offers a sweeping portrait of this vibrant, turbulent era - and paints the picture of a torn country full of tremendous and frightening energies. It is unsettlingly similar to our own present, and - hopefully - still quite different.

Harald Jähner, born in 1953 in Duisburg, was until 2015 the arts editor of the "Berliner Zeitung" and an honorary professor of cultural journalism at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2019 he published "Wolfszeit. Deutschland und die Deutschen 1945-1955", which won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and was published in numerous countries including the USA and the UK, where it was nominated for the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize. In 2022 came "Höhenrausch. Das kurze Leben zwischen den Kriegen", also a "Spiegel" bestseller, translated into many languages.

Host: Jürgen Hardeck