Judith Hermann: “I would like this time travel to be possible”

When Judith Hermann suddenly became famous in 1998 with her volume of stories “Sommerhaus,later,” her spare, dreamy style was completely new. Five years ago she was supposed to explain her literature at the Frankfurt poetry lectures. In the resulting book “We would have told each other everything” she also talks about her family, about her depressed father and his mother, who came from St. Petersburg. Now “I want to go back in time” is published: not a novel, more of an autobiographical essay, with all the signs of literary processing. It’s about the father of Judith Hermann’s mother. She describes the fact that this grandfather joined the NSDAP in 1932 and was in the Waffen-SS as a fact known to the family. There was no talk about it, she says, it was said that people barely remembered him. Judith Hermann was born in 1970; he died before she was born. Your book is an examination of this German silence and a literary attempt to break it.