Monika Maron – »Artur Lanz«

The second evening in the house's new reading series on literature from what it calls the so-called East of Germany, before and after 1989; the first was on Christa Wolf. In »Artur Lanz« (2020) a man gets his lost dog out of a rapeseed field and concludes that this is the most heroic thing he has ever done — from which Monika Maron proceeds to settle accounts with a society she finds heroless, soft and far too correct. The house calls it one of the most contested novels of recent years and does not soften that.