Anna Weidenholzer

Anna Weidenholzer takes up a theme that affects millions of people, yet one that those unaffected cannot really imagine: unemployment. Weidenholzer very carefully selects her novel’s heroine. On the one hand, this woman could not be more ordinary, which underlines the exemplary nature of her fate. On the other hand, the author gives her enough quirky peculiarities to arouse readers’ interest in her as a person.
This Maria Beerenburger is a widow in her late forties, a sales assistant in the textiles trade who has worked in a boutique for 19 years, only to be disdainfully dismissed by the junior manager: “(...) Look on the bright side – now you’re free to make a new start.” (...) The novel’s special structure underlines the lack of future of this existence. Weidenholzer tells Maria’s life story backwards from the present to the beginning in 54 chapters, some of them very short - of her failed marriage from the death of her husband back to their first meeting, and of her great love for another man from his betrayal back to the first promise of love. The crab-walking narrative technique precludes any alternatives in Maria’s life, underlining the tragic arbitrariness of her encounters and decisions.

Sigrid Löffler: “Allein und arbeitslos”
© Deutschlandradio Kultur, 12 March 2013