"1999 Meter über dem Meer"

Reading
presented by Thalia

Leave everything behind! Cross every boundary! Finally be free! - that is what one young woman wants at any cost. Via Bali and Berlin she ends up at the perfect place for impostors and anyone with high ambitions: St. Moritz, and more precisely: "1999 Meter über dem Meer"! There, with her hair dyed a blazing orange, she suddenly moves among the rich and beautiful, passing herself off as an artist. For a long time it works out surprisingly well - were it not for that handsome man with ice-blue eyes...

At the Harbour Front Literaturfestival 2025, Caroline Wahl was an absolute sensation: after the NDR podcast "Eat Read Sleep" at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, the entire audience rose to its feet. And anyone who had hoped to grab a ticket for her reading the next day at "Uebel und Gefährlich" had to admit defeat.

All the more reason to celebrate that Caroline Wahl is returning to Hamburg with her new novel and coming back to the Harbour Front Literaturfestival. At the Deutsches Schauspielhaus she will present "1999 Meter über dem Meer" to a Hamburg audience for the first time.

"1999 Meter über dem Meer" is a wild rollercoaster through life - a story poised between despair and comedy, and incidentally a portrait of our times.

"The author makes it abundantly clear: she is a young woman and she has everything in her hands. That is her message."
- Süddeutsche Zeitung

Caroline Wahl, born in 1995 in Mainz and raised near Heidelberg, studied German language and literature in Tübingen and Berlin. Her debut novel "22 Bahnen" was an immediate and extraordinary success in 2023 - the book won numerous awards and was adapted for the cinema. Further successes followed with "Windstärke 17" and "Die Assistentin". With three million copies sold across three years, Caroline Wahl is now one of the most significant voices in young contemporary German-language literature.