LESUNG: Orient-Express

An Adventure
Look forward to a reading with Dennis Gastmann from "Orient-Express" and be sure to pick up a signed copy afterward in the Bürgschaftssaal at Wismar City Hall!

About the book “Orient-Express”
Following in the footsteps of Agatha Christie and Detective Poirot, someone is setting out on another grand journey: Dennis Gastmann travels in the footsteps of the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul—five thousand kilometers, seventeen cities, and countless detours into adventure. A portrait of a continent in flux, on the move—wild, intense, and vibrant.
Gastmann finds himself in the spotlight of Paris Fashion Week, stays with a nonna who cooks for him as if he were her own son, and learns to understand the city from the water from a female gondolier. Gastmann pets the lions of an oligarch from the Little Carpathians—and is nearly fed to the tigers. Amid fire, fog, and laser lights, he bathes in the world’s largest bowl of noodle soup—as the Hungarians joke—and encounters a flower girl in a Bulgarian slum, right in the middle of a mountain of trash. Gastmann experiences Europe—sometimes by express train, sometimes on a slow local, sometimes by bus through the villages when the tracks end. From the Gare de l’Est to Venice, from Trieste to Budapest, from Belgrade to Sofia, until the doors of the Orient open before his eyes. And everywhere he goes, he senses the changes of the times. What has become of our continent, of the European dream?

About Dennis Gastmann:
Dennis Gastmann, born in 1978, is a writer, filmmaker, and border-crosser. As a reporter for ARD’s international news programs, he traveled to every continent, encountering sorcerers and saints, billionaires, mafiosi, and the Ku Klux Klan. His reports have won multiple awards and have been nominated three times for the Grimme Prize. As an author, he has hiked across the Alps, explored the global jet set, and visited the last hidden corners of the earth. Gastmann lives in Hamburg; his office is the world.

Look forward to a wonderful evening with Dennis Gastmann on Friday, November 6, 2026, in the Bürgersaal at Wismar City Hall.