Discussion CANCELLED: Book Launch - Die Bodenständigen (Barbara Thériault)

Explorations about the sober middle of society

This event has been cancelled due to the current COVID-19 situation, for the protection of the general public.


What is the best way to describe the middle of society in a city in the middle of Germany? Not with the desire for singularity, but with the desire for down-to-earthness, argues Barbara Thériault.
 
If some see down-to-earthness as negative, here - from the protagonists' point of view - it is to be understood as largely positive, as an expression of a typical self-confidence of the middle. With her sociological feuilletons - entertaining and written in the style of the 1920s and 1930s - the sociologist explores everyday life in today's Erfurt and Thuringia with a mixture of empathy, sympathy and distance. The topics covered include checkered shirts, short hair, tattoos, drinking, youth consecration, secret marriages - topics that sometimes make everyday life seem more exotic than faraway countries and which often make readers feel they have been caught out. And because the middle can sometimes be better viewed from the edge, the research also took the author to places such as bars, saunas or lakes, where her protagonists are not in the habit of frequenting.
 
Always with a view from her native Canada or from Eastern Europe, the once first student at the newly founded University of Erfurt reports about everyday life and the atmosphere in Erfurt and the surrounding area in a way that is as perceptive as it is entertaining. Whether on the tram, in the garden or in the bathtub - the texts encourage the reader to discover something new and amusing in the normality of everyday life and invite him or her to reflect on life.
 

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