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

An SS membership card, a faded blood-type tattoo, and a few photographs - these are almost all that remain of a family's void. In "I Want to Go Back in Time" (S. Fischer 2026), Judith Hermann confronts the blind spot of her own family history: a vague trace of her grandfather leads through his posting in Polish Radom, through conversations with her mother, and directly into the mechanisms of repression and denial surrounding family guilt.

In conversation with literary scholar Torsten Hoffmann, Judith Hermann reflects on remembrance, silence, and the forgetting of an entire generation.