The author Heike Geißler, who grew up in Chemnitz, and the Prague
Prague writer Anna Beata Háblová tell the story of women who earn their living
monotonous jobs at a supermarket checkout and in a huge warehouse respectively.
at a supermarket checkout or in a huge warehouse.
During their humdrum work, they think about their lives, dreams and goals.
dreams and goals. Both authors provide a knowledgeable insight
insights into the working world of those who make mass consumption possible
and transform them into often astonishingly poetic literature.
In 2014, Heike Geißler published Saisonarbeit, a fictionalised account of her experiences
of her six-week stint as a temporary worker at Amazon.
Amazon. She describes the depersonalised world of work so vividly,
that you feel like you're standing right next to her as you read. Anna
In her prose text Směna (Engl. ‘The Shift’) from 2022, Beata Háblová lets her protagonist
2022, she lets her protagonist Petra speak. She is a young artist
full of self-doubt who does not feel up to the arrogant art world
arrogant art world and therefore works as a cashier in a supermarket.
supermarket. But here, too, she faces a daily struggle.