Leaving to arrive: Stories of the post-reunification period

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Just like Kathleen, the first-person narrator in Sabine Rennefanz's novel Kosakenberg (2024), Josef, the protagonist in Petr Šesták's book Kontinuita parku (2021, tr. "The Continuity of the Park"), left his home, which had become too small, after the fall of communism. Both want to gain experience in the big world. And both then return. During their mother's visits to Brandenburg, the world that Kathleen actually wanted to escape unfolds an unexpected force and seems to want to clutch the fugitive. Josef also finds himself confronted with unexpected forces in his home town. He wanted to change it with new ideas and culture, but this proves to be extremely difficult. Sabine Rennefanz and Petr Šesták tell intelligent stories of two people in search of their identity, which is essentially characterised by their childhood and youth behind the Iron Curtain, in the field of tension between their small homeland and the big world, leaving and arriving. At the same time, not without humour, they tell of two places in the political East in the years of change and afterwards.