Katharina Hacker

Katharina Hacker was born in Frankfurt in 1967. She has her nameless first–person narrator give an account of village life in loosely–joined prose pieces. The heroine changes and the time levels are blurred. There is the girl with her two brothers Simon and Frederik, who form a conspirative alliance in spite of their tension–fraught relationships, but there is also the grown-up woman who returns to the village with her own two daughters, reinstating the tradition of going on a summer retreat. (…) One is immediately captivated by the “village story” atmosphere. Neither the village, which actually exists and is called Breitenbuch, nor childhood is an idyll. Empathetically and never sliding into cliché, Katharina Hacker conveys the idiosyncrasies of this phase of life, where fantasies, fears and wishes are just as real as concrete reality. The children are continually devising explanations for the adults’ mysteries from which they are strictly excluded. Tides of events have left their mark on people. The grandparents carry with them the experience of expulsion, and the war and its aftermath are still rumbling on underground. The children keep borrowing a handcart to play escaping. Everything is pervaded by the uncanny, as Sigmund Freud describes it.

Maike Albath: „Erinnerungen an eine ländliche Welt“
© Deutschlandradio, Radiofeuilleton, 5 October 2011