There Is No Other Place

In German language

Regina Scheer has made a name for herself in every respect with her two successful novels Machandel and Gott wohnt im Wedding: as a late debutante and as a chronicler of change in twentieth-century Germany. Together with literary editor Andreas Platthaus, she will talk about the challenges of social transformation for her work—especially with regard to geographical permanence. Also, they will discuss her transformation from a cultural scientist into a writer.

Regina Scheer, born in Berlin in 1950, studied theater and cultural studies at Humboldt University. From 1972–1976 she worked at the weekly magazine ‘Forum.’ After that she was a freelance author of reports, essays and song lyrics and a contributor to the literary magazine ‘Temperamente.’ After 1990 she participated in exhibitions, films and anthologies and published several books at the interface between literature and documentation. For her first novel Machandel she received the Mara Cassens Prize in 2014. In 2019, the novel Gott wohnt im Wedding was published. In 2022, a documentary-biographical book will be published under the title Bittere Brunnen.

Andreas Platthaus, born in 1966 in Aachen, studied philosophy, rhetoric and history. He heads the ‘Literature and Literary Life’ department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for which he has written since 1992, and is the author of numerous books, including the major account of the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, 1813, and the portrait of America, On the Palisades. Andreas Platthaus lives in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main.