»In a family, there’s no truth, there are only stories.«
What’s it like not to have any memories of your own father? And none of the country called the German Democratic Republic, where you were born? When you’re dependent on other people’s memories to understand your own history?
Already as a little girl, Johanna loved maps, which make the world easy to grasp. After finishing high school, she moved to Berlin, where – to her mother’s chagrin – she’s now training to be a tram conductor. With Reiner, her instructor, she travels along the big city’s well-organized network of routes and laughs at old GDR jokes without getting them. She begins an affair with Karl, a parentless globetrotter. Her father abandoned her family shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, when Johanna was two. Except for a postcard on the wall, there’s nothing to remind her of him. But then Jens calls, and the life story Johanna has constructed is shaken. Suddenly there are numerous contradictory explanations for her father’s disappearance. Did he flee? Was he arrested? Did Johanna’s mother have something to do with it? Tenderly, laconically and with a great deal of subtle humor, Paula Fürstenberg writes about a touching search for a father, about blind spots, biographical ruptures and the necessity of having a history in which to situate yourself.
»A very special tram ride through Berlin – the divided city, the reunited city. And the remapping of a rutted family landscape. At the steering wheel, charting the terrain: Paula Fürstenberg.« – Saša Stanišić
»Keep asking until you become free of the answers. A lovely, strikingly modest book about the longing for origins.« – Jenny Erpenbeck
