At the end of a long car journey, a family with two children stop at the Böhmerwirt Inn in Binz, on the isle of Rügen at the Baltic Sea coast. This is the starting point for Martina Hefter’s web of narrative. From here onwards, all kinds of pictures are conjured up - from her perception of the present moment, from the media, from childhood - images from long ago, such as when she ran away from the small home town in the German Alps with a friend and crossed the Austrian border towards Italy; the steep cliffs at the seaside, where the children suddenly disappear and hours seem to pass before they are found again; father in the tractor factory; the neighbours from Saxony; the man with the black mask standing on a balcony at the Olympic Games in Munich, holding a machine gun and looking as though he intends to do something, although her parents tell her it’s no concern of hers, it’s something a child cannot understand.
In her narrative Martina Hefter does away with the restrictions of time and place, in a wonderfully light language that raises the weight of earthly existence to a kind of floating state. She writes with playful energy and an incredible sensual mobility, revolves around her subjects, then returns to the starting point - a celebration of being on the move.
Martina Hefter`s narrative images are finely woven and powerful. The prose captures and focuses on memories from the past and present moments.
»In a humorous and charming way, Martina Hefter shows how reality emerges from the virtual world of language.«
Martin Krumbolz, NZZ
The Authoress
Martina Hefter, born in 1965 in Pfronten/Allgäu, was trained as a dance educationalist, worked as a dancer and dancing teacher, studied at the Literature Institute in Leipzig. She published the novels »Junge Hunde« (Young Dogs, 2001) and »Zurück auf Los« (Return to Go, 2005), lives in Leipzig.
