Heike Geißler liest aus »Michaela Kohlhaas«

Michaela Kohlhaas is a scold, a foul-mouthed woman, a tender soul. A great lover who doesn’t merely want things to be better—she demands restitution and atonement. And a completely different order of the world. Heike Geißler’s character Michaela Kohlhaas is a daring reimagining of Heinrich von Kleist’s famous novella “Michael Kohlhaas.”

“His sense of justice turned him into a robber and a murderer.” So writes Heinrich von Kleist about the horse dealer Michael Kohlhaas, who exacts bloody retribution after suffering an injustice. Two hundred years later, his campaign of vengeance serves as a model for Michaela Kohlhaas, an assistant cemetery administrator.
Fueled by a deep-seated sense of arbitrariness and powerlessness, she becomes a rebel. But where Michael Kohlhaas murders and pillages, she fights with words: through escalation, exaggeration, sabotage, and theatrics. Like a supposed witch, she roams the countryside cursing and casting spells. And she comes to realize: It is a disadvantage to be a woman. It is a disadvantage to fight back. Yet even if the whole world declares her insane—she marches “with banners flying” toward her end, hoping for a happy ending, yet sensing that such an ending may never come.

Heike Geißler, born in Riesa in 1977, is an author. She also works across genres in various artistic collaborations (Sabotique and George Bele). Heike Geißler was most recently the Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence at the Free University of Berlin and has received the Klopstock Prize for New Literature, the Heinrich Böll Prize, and the Bavarian Book Prize. She lives in Leipzig.

Moderator: Tobi Lindemann

Author photo: Heike Steinweg