Cultural series at Hotel Morgenland

Pascale Hugues

read from her book on September 21, 2017

Germany à la francaise

Pascale Hugues is French and has lived in Berlin for many years. In Deutschland à la française she writes about everyday life; the language and the mentality in this country that is close to her and at the same time still a bit foreign. She looks at the very small and sees in it the very big. Curious, she strolls through the streets and parks, listens to the conversations and explores the peculiarities on both sides of the Rhine. Everything is interesting, from the presidential palace to the garbage cellar, the strange word “nipple,” how to eat dinner, answer the phone, how to go on strike, and when politicians are considered corrupt.
She also checks clichés for their true core. Are the Germans really so tidy and the French so easy-going? Where does the German soul reveal itself? And when the French esprit? A smart, knowledgeable, humorous book from the perspective of an author who is at home in two worlds, loves them both – and observes with a keen eye.

Photo: Dagmar Morath

Klaus Wowereit

was a guest at Hotel Morgenland on 07 June 2018 and presented his book:

Sexy, but not so poor anymore: my Berlin

Klaus Wowereit takes a look at his eventful, unconventional political life – and at “his” Berlin, with all its facets. In doing so, he reflects on the role of the politician as well as that of the big city, whose problems are exemplary for the great social challenges of our time. He tells what it means to spend decades in the political arena without losing his private life and his humanity.

Entering politics again is not an option for Wowereit. But he loved his work – he still loves his city. He talks about both very openly in this book.

“If there is one thing I would like to see, it is an all-German awareness that Berlin is the capital of everyone, not just the capital of Berliners. A capital that is open to the world, dynamic, aware of its turbulent history, economically, politically and culturally turned toward the future.” KLAUS WOWEREIT

Christian Berkel

opened the celebrity round at Hotel Morgenland on February 21, 2019. He presented his family history:

The apple tree

“For years I ran away from my story. Then I reinvented it.”

For his family’s novel, actor Christian Berkel traced his roots. He has visited archives, read correspondence, and traveled. The result is a great family novel set against the backdrop of an entire century of German history, the tale of an unusual love.

Berlin 1932: Sala and Otto are thirteen and seventeen years old when they fall in love. He comes from the working class, she from an intellectual Jewish family. In 1938, Sala has to leave her German homeland and finds shelter with her Jewish aunt in Paris until the Germans invade France. While Otto goes to war with the Wehrmacht as a medical doctor, Sala is betrayed during an escape attempt and interned in a camp in the Pyrenees. There, people quickly die of hunger or epidemics, and those who survive until 1943 are deported to Auschwitz. Sala is lucky, she is put on a train to Leipzig and goes into hiding.

Shortly before the end of the war, Otto was taken prisoner in Russia, from which he returned to destroyed Berlin in 1950. For Sala, too, peace marks the beginning of an odyssey that takes her all the way to Buenos Aires. There she tries to build a new life, fails and returns. For ten years they have not seen each other. But when Sala sees Otto’s name in the phone book, she knows she never forgot him.

Christian Berkel narrates his family’s suspenseful novel with great elegance. It leads over three generations from Ascona, Berlin, Paris, Gurs and Moscow to Buenos Aires. In the end, there is the story of two lovers who could not be more different and yet do not let go of each other throughout their lives.

Photo: Gerald von Foris

Its ….

Women’s Stories

…. are legendary. On September 10, 2019 inspired

Hubertus Meyer-Burckhardt

his audience at the Hotel Morgenland!

As host of one of the most successful talk shows on television, Hubertus Meyer-Burckhardt has made an experience: women tend to become anarchic in old age, while men tend to become more meaningful in old age.
What remains of the person without the function? A question that women face with pleasure, men with concern. Women break up when life doesn’t keep the date, men break in. If Mother Earth had a world heritage to award, it would be women. These women are – representative of all others: Doris Dörrie, Veronica Ferres, Elke Heidenreich, Leslie Malton, Ina Müller, Ulrike Murmann, Erika Pluhar, Marianne Sägebrecht, Barbara Schöneberger and Christine Westermann.
Above Meyer-Burckhardt’s women’s stories collected in this highly entertaining book is a phrase like a headline: it comes from Barbara Schöneberger: “I recommend living.”

His autobiography

One life is too little

provided

Gregor Gysi

to our numerous audience on October 29, 2019.

Gregor Gysi shaped left-wing thinking and became one of its most important protagonists. Here he tells of his many lives: as a family man, lawyer, politician, author and presenter. His autobiography is a history book that brings the shocks and extremes, the designs and disappointments of the 20th century to life in a very personal way.

“It’s amazing what has to happen for your own life to emerge at some point.” Gregor Gysi