Heike Geißler liest aus »Michaela Kohlhaas«

In the organizer's words:

Michaela Kohlhaas is a scold, a stinker, a tender. A great lover who doesn't just want improvement - she demands reparation and atonement. And a completely different arrangement of the world. Heike Geißler's character Michaela Kohlhaas is a daring rewrite of the famous novella "Michael Kohlhaas" by Heinrich von Kleist.

"A sense of justice turned him into a robber and murderer." This is how Heinrich von Kleist tells the story of the horse trader Michael Kohlhaas, who seeks bloody revenge after suffering injustice. Two hundred years later, his campaign of revenge is the model for Michaela Kohlhaas, a deputy cemetery administrator.
Fueled by her experience of arbitrariness and powerlessness, she becomes a rebel. But where Michael Kohlhaas murders and pillages, she fights with words: with exaggeration, exaggeration, sabotage and show. Like a supposed witch, she travels the country cursing and uttering imprecations. And has to realize: It is a disadvantage to be a woman. It is a disadvantage to fight back. But even if the whole world declares her insane - she goes "with waving flags" towards her end, hoping for a good ending, and yet suspecting that there may not be such an end.

Heike Geißler, born in Riesa in 1977, is an author. She also works across different genres in various formations (Sabotique and George Bele). Heike Geißler was most recently Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence at the FU Berlin and received the Klopstock Prize for New Literature, the Heinrich Böll Prize and the Bavarian Book Prize. She lives in Leipzig.

Author photo: Heike Steinweg This content has been machine translated.