If I Were a Cloud

January 1956: Seventeen years after fleeing Nazi Germany at the last minute, Mascha Kaléko returns. It is a journey into her past – burdened with the anxious question of whether it might also be a journey into the future.

She travels to Berlin, the city where she had once been happy, where she had found success as a poet, which she had loved. Over the course of a year, she journeys across the country. Almost every day, she writes letters to her husband, the love of her life, who remained in New York. In them, she describes fairy-tale successes, a miracle in Berlin, and deep abysses. She writes of an old, new Germany.

Recounting the story of just one year, Volker Weidermann reveals the arc of an entire German-Jewish life. It is the story of a poet whose humor, wit, and melancholy still resonate with us today.