Bookclub
Goethe Book Club: “Empty Hearts” by Juli Zeh

Tue, 09/14/2021
6:00 PM - 19:30 CDT Online

Meet to discuss works from contemporary German-speaking authors in our Goethe Book Club hosted by Chris Walker. Each selection can be read in its English translation or original German; the discussion will be in English. 
 
On Tuesday, September 14th at 6:00 pm CDT we will meet to discuss Juli Zeh’s Empty Hearts (German title: “Leere Herzen”, 2017, translated by John Cullen). 
 
The book is also available in the Goethe Institut’s eLibrary. You can borrow a free digital copy (in German only).
 
About the book

A few short years from now, the world is an even more uncertain place than it is today, and politics everywhere is marching rightward: Trump is gone, but Brexit is complete, as is Frexit. There’s a global financial crisis, armed conflict, and mass migration, and an ultrapopulist movement governs in Germany. With their democracy facing the wrecking ball, most well-off Germans turn inward, focusing on their own lives. Britta, a wife, mother, and successful businesswoman, ignores the daily news and concentrates on her family and her work running a clinic specializing in suicide prevention.

But her legitimate business is connected to a secret and far more lucrative operation known as “The Bridge”, an outfit that supplies terrorist organizations looking to employ suicide bombers. Using a complex candidate-identifying algorithm designed by Babak, a brilliant programmer and Britta’s only employee, “The Bridge” has effectively cornered the market, and terrorism never takes place without Britta’s services—which is why news of a thwarted suicide attack in Leipzig comes as a shock. Then “The Bridge’s” database is stolen, driving Britta, Babak, and their latest recruit into hiding. On their heels is a new terrorist organization called the “Empty Hearts”, a group unlike any Britta and Babak have encountered before.

Part suspenseful thriller, part wickedly effective social satire, Empty Hearts is a novel for our times, examining urgent questions of morality, politics, and culture and presenting a startling vision of a future where empathy is a thing of the past.
 
About the author
 
Juli Zeh‘s novels include Eagles and Angels, In Free Fall, and Decompression. She has worked at the United Nations in New York, taught at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig, and currently lives in Brandenburg, where she is an honorary constitutional judge. She has been awarded numerous prizes for her work, including the German Book Prize, the Carl Amery Literature Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, and the Hildegard von Bingen Award, and several of her novels have been adapted for film and television. In 2018, she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her outstanding contribution to literature.
 
 
Summary: Courtesy of Penguin Random House