"I Want to Go Back in Time" - Judith Hermann

An SS membership card, a faded blood-type tattoo, and a handful of photographs - that is almost all that frames the family void. In "I Want to Go Back in Time" (S. Fischer 2026), Judith Hermann turns toward the blind spot in her own family history. The blurred trail of her grandfather leads through his posting in the Polish city of Radom, through conversations with her mother, and into the mechanisms by which families suppress and look away from their own guilt.

Judith Hermann discusses memory, silence, and the forgetting of an entire generation with literary scholar Torsten Hoffmann.