From the jury’s statement of the Lipzig Bookfair Award:
“‘Die Verwandelten’ [‘the transformed’] are women who had to change their role or even their identity in the course of war and ideology.
Ulrike Draesner follows the female lines of a branching family to tell about power and its effects. The novel's language, which varies in time and region and also has its humour, leads urgently to questions of the present.”
A moving mother-daughter novel stretching across a century of European history.
A model Nazi mother who teaches others how to raise their children while refusing to speak of the great loss she has suffered; a cook travelling across Germany in the summer of 1945 who would rather make love to women than to her employer; a lawyer and single mother who unexpectedly inherits a flat in Wrocław and discovers a hitherto unknown Polish branch of her family – these women are all bound together by a century of war and post-war life, flight, expulsion and violence.
How do you write about what happens to women in wartime – the way their voices are taken from them, the way they are changed for ever, and the hidden forces that keep them going? In Penetrating Silence, Ulrike Draesner gives these women their voices back as they reinvent themselves, change language and country, and discover within themselves an unsuspected wellspring of courage, humour and strength. A devastating novel – moving, unsettling, tender and perceptive.
• The themes and topics of the novel will be further explored in a travelling exhibition in Stuttgart and in Wrocław, Poland, with further international stations (such as Rome, Boston, Montréal, and Singapore) being planned