Author dedications

Jo Lendle

Jo Lendle was born in Osnabrück in 1968. He was the editor of the literary magazine “Edit” and a lecturer and visiting professor at the universities of Munich, Leipzig and Hildesheim. Jo Lendle now lives in Cologne.

About the book:

You don’t choose the times you get into that shape you. Just like Lud and Alma. Lud, born in 1899, and his brother Wilhelm adore Bach and Hölderlin and share the same unattainable ideals. Wilhelm, who joins the National Socialist Party at an early age, measures others against it, Lud himself, which makes him struggle with himself all his life. Alma lost her parents when she was still a child. Her godfather Lud, little older than herself, and his housekeeper will become a kind of family to her. A professor of pharmacology, Lud researches sleep and how to produce it. While he spends his days at the university, Alma can’t stop thinking about him at home. When he starts researching poison gas, he doesn’t tell her about it. His struggle with the noble ideals becomes more desperate. For there is also Gerhard, at whose side he fought in the First World War, whom he cannot get out of his head. From the German Empire to National Socialism and the young GDR to the post-war Federal Republic, Jo Lendle’s novel takes us through the breakup of a family, guilt, science and its relationship to the world, and the subtle differences between sleep, anesthesia, and death. It is the story of a German family – coincidentally his own.