Mitleserunde

Once a month, we meet and read texts together. Sometimes we read current novels, sometimes texts by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff - and sometimes we talk about how texts can be read together at all.

In October and November we read the novel Dunkelblum by Eva Menasse: At first glance, Dunkelblum is a small town like any other. But behind the façade of the Austrian community lies the story of a terrible crime. Their knowledge of the event has bound the older Dunkelblumers together for decades – just like their silence about the crime and the perpetrator. In the late summer days of 1989, while hundreds of GDR refugees are already waiting behind the nearby border to Hungary, a mysterious visitor arrives in the town. Then things suddenly start to move: A skeleton is dug up in a meadow on the outskirts of the city and a young woman disappears. As if in a haunting, traces of the old crime emerge – and confront the Dunkelblumers with a past they had long thought settled.