Cultural series at Hotel Morgenland

@ Foto-AG Gymnasium Melle

Jürgen Trittin

ALLES MUSS ANDERS BLEIBEN

As a post-war child, Green politician Jürgen Trittin has been a witness and protagonist of Germany’s political history since the early 1970s.   As a student and squatter, he experienced the social-liberal years, helped build up the Greens during the Kohl government, was a state minister and paved the way for Green participation in the federal government in 1998 and again in 2021.
He now takes stock along political milestones.
His autobiographical reflections are more than just personal and committed testimonies – they are a piece of contemporary history.

@ www.droemer-knaur.de

Florian Illies

presented his book, Magic of Silence, on March 4, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. in the Hotel Morgenland.

No German painter triggers such emotions as Caspar David Friedrich: his evening skies are icons of longing to this day, he inspired Samuel Beckett to create “Waiting for Godot” and Walt Disney to create “Bambi” – but Goethe was so enraged by the enigmatic melancholy of his paintings that he wanted to smash them on the edge of a table.
In his large-scale journey through time, Florian Illies tells the story of Friedrich’s paintings for the first time: countless of his most beautiful paintings were burnt, first in his birthplace and then during the Second World War, while others, such as the “Chalk Cliffs on Rügen”, emerge from the mists of history a hundred years after Friedrich’s death.
Illies tells how Friedrich’s paintings ended up at the Russian Tsar’s court, between the winter tires in a Mafia car repair shop and in the kitchen of a Hessian council apartment.
As revered by Hitler as he was by Heinrich von Kleist, as hated by Stalin as he was by the ’68ers – the example of Friedrich makes 250 years of German history visible.

(www.fischerverlage.de)

Photo: Mathias Bothor

Maxim Leo

presented his novel published in March at  on May 23, 2024.

We will be young

before.

Their lives are thrown off course when the participants in a drug trial at Berlin’s Charité hospital suddenly become younger.
Jakob has just met his first love and suddenly loses all desire.
Jenny has wanted a child for many years in vain and suddenly becomes pregnant.
Wenger, a seriously ill real estate patriarch, bids farewell to the world with a lavish party, only to blossom again shortly afterwards – much to the despair of his heirs.
And Verena, the two-time Olympic 100-meter freestyle champion, has long since put her professional days behind her when she surprisingly sets new records at an exhibition match between ex-stars.
When the public finds out about her rejuvenation, events come thick and fast.

An incredibly clear-sighted novel that follows its protagonists through the craziest year of their lives, full of humor and warmth.

And which, as if in passing, poses the major ethical and social questions that will arise if the research into the biological rejuvenation of humans, which is running at full speed worldwide, is successful.

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.
Meyer-Burckhardt’s women’s stories collected in this highly entertaining book are headlined with a sentence by 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