Die Gegenwart aus ihren Widersprüchen begreifen. Navid Kermani erzählt vom “Sommer24″. Anne-Dore Krohn fragt

Fewer and fewer people are prepared to seek out conversations beyond their own views and convictions. Fewer and fewer people are basing their opinions on their own views and are prepared to go to great lengths to do so. The writer Navid Kermani is a person who speaks, travels, thinks, endures. And he is a companion of the festival: in 2007, in the very first program, he was our guest with his novel "Kurzmitteilung". In 2016, he was at our side on stage when we had to open the festival shortly after Roger Willemsen's death. So in the twentieth year, he can't be missing.

"Sommer 24" is the title of his new novel. Through his narrator, Navid Kermani captures a year that will probably one day be recorded in the history books as a turning point: The election in the USA, the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan. Knife attacks and the success of right-wing populism, the creeping change in political systems and social values. Navid Kermani's narrator is increasingly haunted by the feeling of losing so-called normality. Many things in this individual's life are also falling apart at the seams: there is the suicide of a Jewish friend, the accusations of his girlfriend, the experiences on a trip to Tigray.

With this book, Navid Kermani once again proves himself to be a chronicler of our times, a keen observer and a gentle describer of the individual in the contradictions of the present. Anne-Dore Krohn talks to him about his work on the Book of Time and about how seemingly irreconcilable things can be reconciled and how to endure what simply cannot be reconciled