A Sense of life

Zusatztext

We take our time in finding our way back to one another. How many more years will it take, I wonder?
 When I cross the old border, I sometimes feel at home, and at other times as though I have stepped into a different country.
 Countless times we have spoken, within the family and among friends, about the reasons for this recurring sensation, yet we have never moved beyond tentative attempts at explanation.
 Told stories, not abstract or depersonalized, but lived and spoken, can help.
 Not only the one who has lived the life in question, but also the "other," the one who listens or reads. It is no simple task, yet to listen, and to allow the words to work upon oneself, is one possible path.
 Particularly for the older generation, ideologically entrenched, who endured the madness of division.
 And, in a quieter way, for the younger generation too, who must bear so many inherited 'truths'.
 And yet, despite everything, life remains wonderfully compelling; without its fractures, its lessons would be quite different ¿ and I would not have wished to forgo them.
 Thus the audiobook A Sense of Life is precisely the kind of narrative that offers the deeper understanding we Germans so greatly need.

Autorenportrait

I was born on 1 August 1962 in Wismar. After completing my apprenticeship at the Piesteritz chemical combine and my military service in the navy, I studied Energy Plant Engineering through a distance-learning programme at the Technical University of Dresden.My interest in political education was sparked early on by the pervasive politicisation of everyday life in the GDR. My first novel, A Sense of Life, reflects these experiences and the living conditions in East Germany. I also wove into the narrative the political upheaval of 1989 and the years immediately following reunification, attempting to offer insights that extend beyond my personal story.My interests, however, have never been confined to the political sphere. They reach into philosophical questions as wellquestions inevitably shaped by the social realities I encountered, in close connection with my own lived experience. From this grew my second book, which explores various aspects of what it means to be happy, placing selected elements of this vast subject into thematic contexts. Its title, Well Then, Good Luck!, expresses the hope that each of us might make the best of our lives in order, ultimately, to be happy in some form.My third and, for now, most recent book seeks to answer a central question: how did our present social order, with its increasingly pressing problems in almost every sphere of life, come to follow such a negative trajectory? All too often, we stand in our own way and the better we become at doing so, the gloomier the prospects for the future appear. With this in mind, I pose a question to civil society as a whole: Is this really the best we can do? The future suggests or rather, makes plain that what we have achieved so far will not be enough to meet the challenges ahead.

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