October 9, 2025 / 7.30 pm / Literature Café

Thomas Strässle "Escape novella"

Erfurt, 1965: A student from the GDR and a student from Switzerland meet in the "House of the Red Army". They fall in love and want a life together, but the Iron Curtain separates them. It is out of the question for both of them that he could join her in the East, and so they desperately search for a way for her to go to the West. When they realize that they can't do it legally, they come up with an ingenious plan to attack the system from the side it pays the least attention to: the GDR does everything it can to prevent people from leaving the country, so they try to enter from the opposite direction. The route leads via Prague, they prepare everything meticulously, but when the decisive moment arrives, nothing goes as planned ...

Thomas Strässle tells of the power of love against the superiority of systems. He tells the true story of two young people who put everything on the line, the story of his parents (Suhrkamp 2025).

"Thomas Strässle tells an almost unbelievably good story... so fabulous that the reader can only say with delight: This is exactly what a good book is." (Elke Heidenreich, Süddeutsche Zeitung)

Thomas Strässle, born in 1972 in Baden, Switzerland, studied literature, philosophy and musicology in Zurich, Cambridge and Paris. Today he is head of the transdisciplinary Y Institute at Bern University of the Arts and Professor of Modern German and Comparative Literature at the University of Zurich. He was awarded the 2025 Canton of Bern Literature Prize for his "Fluchtnovelle".

Admission: 10,- / 7,- EUR

Event organized by the Literaturhaus Leipzig e.V.