Those Wonderful Years: The Days when We Travelled the World
THOSE WONDERFUL YEARS: THE DAYS WHEN WE TRAVELLED THE WORLD
WUNDERBARE JAHRE. ALS WIR NOCH DIE WELT BEREISTEN
GENRE Essays, LANGUAGE German
“Nobody understands better than Sybille Berg the perversion of our global aspirations. Those Wonderful Years is the logbook of a journey into cultural catastrophe.” PHILIPPE THEISOHN
SIBYLLE BERG was born in Weimar, in the former German Democratic Republic. Today she divides her time between Tel Aviv and Zürich, where she works as a playwright and author. She has written fifteen novels, seventeen stage plays and innumerable essays. She’s been translated into thirty-four languages. Hanser Verlag has published Der Mann schläft (2009), Vielen Dank für das Leben (2012), Wie halte ich das nur alles aus? (2013) and most recently Der Tag, an dem meine Frau einen Mann fand (2015).
PHOTO © Katharina Lütscher
Paris, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Thailand… places we long to go to and to explore, because we regard them as beautiful, romantic, exotic, perhaps even a little bit dangerous. But – are they still? Sibylle Berg’s view is: “no”. The days when we longed to escape are gone, she says, and the world of the 21st century has become somewhere we wish to escape from. Her pen is sharp and caustic, but also funny and discerning, as she writes how travel is not what it once was. Beaches are battlegrounds, cafés are bombing zones, cruise ships are “environmental killing fields” where “personal space is portion-controlled”. These essays and columns, written over the past twenty years and revised and expanded for this book, are Berg’s very personal travelogues. And she’s no armchair traveller: she’s been there, done that and tells us about it soberly, idealising nothing, but never without emotion. This is a highly intellectual and readable “anti-guidebook”.
Read 15 pages from the book in German and English
TITLE Wunderbare Jahre. Als wir noch die Welt bereisten
PUBLISHER Hanser, Munich
PUBLICATION DATE September 2016
PAGES 160
ISBN 978-3-446-25359-9
TRANSLATION RIGHTS Friederike Barakat, friederike.barakat@hanser.de
WUNDERBARE JAHRE. ALS WIR NOCH DIE WELT BEREISTEN, SIBYLLE BERG
German original
Wie seltsam schnell und doch verzögert in der Wahrnehmung sich die Welt verändert. Hat. In den Synapsen stecken immer noch Bilder von früher. Von reizenden Reisen. Da einem, außer einer Darmgrippe, nichts passieren konnte. Entspannt fuhr man nach Griechenland, durchquerte die Wüste Gobi, hockte im Jemen und beobachte Menschen beim Leben und reiste nach Paris. Cafés unter grünen Platanen, immer schmerzende Füße vom zu vielen Laufen, Endorphine. Das ist gespeichert, das macht ein Ziehen in der Brust, und das überlagert die realen Bilder… Read more
THOSE WONDERFUL YEARS: THE DAYS WHEN WE TRAVELLED THE WORLD, SIBYLLE BERG
Excerpt translated by Damion Searls
It’s strange how quickly the world changes, though some time passes before we become aware of it. How quickly it has changed. Images from before still linger in our synapses. Exciting trips, with no danger of anything worse than a stomach bug. You flew to Greece, carefree, or crossed the Gobi Desert, or sat in Yemen observing how the people lived. You took a trip to Paris – cafés under green plane trees, constant sore feet from all the walking: endorphins. All this is stored up, it tugs at your heart, and it overlays and conceals the real pictures… Read more
“This author has written a good dozen novels and many more plays about the contradictions and incongruities of life. These texts naturally enough have an element of meanness and disenchantment to them, but also a whiff of sentimentality.” BERLINER MORGENPOST
