A novel about friendship, love and red wine
City Library: Reading with Bernd Schirmer on 2 February, 6 p.m., TIETZ
On Thursday, 2 February, author Bernd Schirmer will read from his novel "Silberblick" at the Stefan Heym Forum in the TIETZ. Tickets at a price of 6 euros, concessions 4 euros, can be booked by telephone on 0371 488 4366.
"Silberblick" is considered one of the strongest picaresque novels about the GDR. It is a book about friendship, love and red wine and the absurd, futile and beautiful in a finite world. It is set in the 1960s, when the protagonists and friends Burkhard Schlotheim and Josef Birnbaum begin studying education in Leipzig in order to escape military service. There they meet Anna, a half-French woman, and find a rival for their love in Carl Clausberger. After a summer trip to the Black Sea, there are only three of them left. They dream of Paris and live in the Oderbruch, Hinterlückenstein in the Erzgebirge and Berlin. Only when the Wall falls is the world open to them, but by then it is already too late for Anna.
The author:
Bernd Schirmer, born in Leipzig in 1940, grew up in Scheibenberg in the Ore Mountains and studied German and English language and literature in Leipzig after leaving school and serving in the People's Army. He then worked as a radio play dramaturge, German lecturer and dramaturge for German television. He has been a freelance author since 1991 and has published short stories, novels, screenplays, radio plays and translations from French. Schlehwein's Giraffe" was published in 1992. This was followed in 1994 by the novel "Cahlenberg", for which he was awarded the publishers' scholarship at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition in 1989. The novel "Silberblick" was published in October 2017, for which he received the Kammweg Literature Prize in 2018.
Bernd Schirmer lives near Berlin.