„Hier waren wir alle.“ Lesung aus dem unveröffentlichten Roman mit Ines Koenen

Four generations come together in the novel "We were all here": The brothers Wilhelm and Bernard Koenen, one a communist member of the Reichstag, the other a trade unionist and comrade, Wilhelm's son Heinrich, an engineer and aircraft designer, and his wife Friedel, were the tango kings of Moscow in the 1920s.

She gave birth to their daughter Ingeborg in 1942 in the middle of frosty Siberia. Of Bernard's sons Alfred and Viktor, only one returned to Germany after the end of the war. Wilhelm's daughter Johanna was an agent of the NKVD in the USA and was caught up in an unresolvable perpetrator-victim dynamic. All of them were convinced communists and socialists who had lived for years in exile in the Soviet Union and England.

This family survived - whether with a clear party mission or as refugees - in Prague, London, Moscow, Tomsk, Eisleben, Halle, Dresden, Kiel, Berlin and New York. It was an uncertain life marked by flight, exile, loss of home, imprisonment and illegality. After the war ended in Berlin and Moscow between 1945 and 1947, all the loose ends came together again.

From the perspective of her granddaughter, who was born in the socialist GDR, Ines Koenen has created a detailed portrait of various people. They were communists as well as grandfathers and grandmothers, mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts and left their traces behind.