In conversation with Annett Gröschner

In "Striker", Helene Hegemann creates a powerful, contemporary panorama of Berlin: between her apartment with a creepy attic squatter near Oberbaumbrücke, a martial arts hall and a villa at the other end of the city. Her protagonist moves through spaces in which violence and exhaustion, inside and outside intermingle. With physical intensity, Hegemann deals with questions of power, powerlessness and physicality in a fragile urban present. Berlin is not just a place of action, but both an actor and a condition. She talks to Annett Gröschner about living and writing in and about Berlin - a setting that has featured in many of her texts since "Axolotl Roadkill".