Parole Text:Buch • Das Wohlbefinden - Ulla Lenze

Ulla Lenze has written a great novel about the seductive power of self-redemption in her incomparably crystalline prose:

Hidden in the pine forests outside Berlin lie the Beelitz workers' lung sanatorium. When the factory worker Anna Brenner and the writer Johanna Schellmann meet here in 1907, it has existential consequences for both women.

Anna is considered clairvoyant, and although the avant-garde of the imperial era enthusiastically experiments with the occult, Anna's growing following becomes a problem for the director of the sanatorium. The encounter reveals a deeply buried spirituality in Johanna, and she suspects that Anna could play a key role in her literary work. But Anna doesn't let herself be taken over, by anyone.

Sixty years later, Johanna Schellmann tries to find words for her entanglements in the past, but it is only Vanessa, her great-granddaughter, who brings light into the darkness - in the middle of a luxuriously renovated Beelitz, through which the ghosts of the past still blow. From the German Empire to the present, Ulla Lenze portrays the lives of three women who experience liberation and advancement and yet cannot save themselves from the impending loss of importance.

"Ulla Lenze writes great, emotionally intense prose. Real and true and honest." David Wagner

Ulla Lenze, born in Mönchengladbach in 1973, studied music and philosophy in Cologne. She has received several awards for her novels, including the Jürgen Ponto Prize for the best debut in 2003, the Rolf Dieter Brinkmann Prize and the Ernst Willner Prize at the Bachmann Competition.

In 2016, Ulla Lenze received the Literature Prize of the Cultural Circle of the German Economy for her entire work and in 2020 the Lower Rhine Literature Prize of the City of Krefeld. Her novel The Receiver (2020) has been translated into twelve languages. In spring 2023, she held the prestigious Max Kade Visiting Professorship at Dartmouth College (USA). Ulla Lenze lives in Buckow near Berlin.