Wenn ich eine Wolke wäre. Mascha Kaléko

Reading and discussion with Volker Weidermann

"I have to rely on miracles" - Seventeen years after Mascha Kaléko left Nazi Germany at the last minute, she returns in 1956. She travels to Berlin, the city where she had been happy and where she had become a successful poet. But she also traveled throughout the country for a whole year. Almost every day, she sends letters to New York, to her husband, and tells of fairytale successes, a miracle in Berlin, of abysses and of an old, new country. Volker Weidermann writes about a single year and reveals an entire German-Jewish life. It is the story of a poet in whose humour, wit and melancholy we recognize ourselves. Weidermann, born in Darmstadt in 1969, was the host
of the "Literary Quartet" on ZDF. He is a cultural correspondent for DIE ZEIT and the author of numerous books.