It’s the surprise of the book season: Lukas Rietzschel’s novel “Sanditz” has conquered the bestseller list and has been in the top ten there for three weeks. Rietzschel, born in 1994 in Räckelwitz in East Saxony, tells a family story between adaptation and rebellion in Lusatia. With quiet laconicism, people’s lines of life, love and longing are interwoven from the GDR to the present day. At one point it says about Maria, who returned from the West to the East German province: “Just live a good life. Smoke a cigarette, swim in the quarry, turn the heads of teenagers – that should be possible. Maybe she lived in the wrong area at the wrong time.”
With the book, Rietzschel finally establishes himself as a young narrator of the East German emotional turmoil of powerlessness, hope and will to persevere. His debut novel, “Strike the World with Your Fist,” about quiet anger and right-wing violence in the 1990s, became a bestseller; the film adaptation was celebrated at the Berlinale last year.
Lead actress Anja Schneider, born in 1977 in Altenburg, Thuringia, described the mood of the post-reunification period in the Tagesspiegel interview as follows: “The shame of the parents that they no longer understand life properly and cannot find the right language for it was passed on to the children.” Lukas Rietzschel’s books find the right language for this.