Sibylle Berg

Wunderbare Jahre

«Am ersten Tag sagt die Dame am Flughafen: Ach, Sie fahren da runter, ich mag die Berichte nicht mehr sehen. Da blickt ja keiner durch. Na ja, Krieg is schon schlimme. Gott sei Dank ist er weit weg.»

Paris, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Thailand … place we long to go and to explore, because we regard them as beautiful, romantic, exotic, perhaps even a little bit dangerous. But – are they still? Sibylle Berg's view is: «no». The days when we longed to escape are gone, she says, and the world of the 21th century has become somewhere we wish to escape from. Her pen is sharp and caustic, but also funny and discerning, as she writes how travel is not what it once was. Beaches are battlegrounds, cafés are bombing zones, cruise ships are «environmental killing fields» where «personal space is portion-controlled». These essays and columns, written over the past twenty years and revised and expanded for this book, are Berg's very personal travelogues. And she's no armchair traveller: she's been there, done that and tells us about it soberly, idealising nothing, but never without emotion. This is a highly intellectual and readable «anti-guidebook».

(Recommended for Translation by Pro Helvetia, 2016)

Translation of title: (Those wonderful Years: the Days When We Travelled the World)

Hanser Verlag, München 2016

ISBN: 978-3-446-25359-9