Theresia Enzensberger has written a novel about social collapse. A conversation about the catastrophe awareness of the present and the longing to start all over again.
Interviewed by
Marlene Knobloch
“At Sea” is the name of Theresia Enzensberger’s second novel, published a few days ago was immediately nominated for the German Book Prize. In it, the 35-year-old author slyly and eerily glimpses a future in which the gap between rich and poor has widened so far that Berlin is torn apart: tent cities in the Tiergarten, single mothers sleeping in cars, and a rich, hysterical elite the artist glorifies Helena into a modern oracle. The second main character, Yada, grows up on an artificial island in the Baltic Sea. Her father, founder of that island state, brought her there to save himself from the alleged end of the world. Is it all sci-fi, or is there an apocalyptic premonition lurking in the face of recent nuclear button threats?