DEBUTANTS' BALL: Anja Gmeinwieser / Martin Piekar / Lara Rüter - 40th Freiburg Literary Discussion: A Conversation About Three Debuts
Anja Gmeinwieser: *Wir Königinnen*
Moderator: Leo Boquoi
Three books, three songs, one evening! Three magnificent debuts that ask big questions: What is a human being? What is an animal? Who are my neighbors? What language do we speak?
Anja Gmeinwieser kicks off the event with her road novel *We Queens* (Berlin Verlag, 2026) and a cell phone that flies “with an exaggerated gesture from the first peak” of the Alps. Fleeing her all-too-ordinary life, the narrator meets Anna, who is driving a heavy-haul truck loaded with pregnant cows to Turkey. A spontaneous “I’m coming along” turns into a bond forged through international “bad English” and an occasionally hallucinating cell phone translator—a love affair set against the backdrop of highways. But as it gets hotter and hotter inside the truck, the animals fall ill, and Anna’s boss doesn’t pay—it also turns into a hellish journey—all the way to the EU’s external border, where dreams and cows come to a standstill.
“These two women aren’t just fictional characters; they embody solidarity, hope, and rebellion,” writes author Mareike Fallwickl about Gmeinwieser’s debut, which subverts the classic Western plot of the cattle drive and weaves in questions of motherhood, work, and identity.
Martin Piekar: On Felling a Family Tree
Moderator: Sonja Karadza
When Martin Piekar read excerpts from his debut novel *On Felling a Family Tree* (Rowohlt, 2026) at the 2023 Bachmann Reading Competition, he impressed the audience with his precise, poetic language—and a loud, long scream: The cry of a young man overwhelmed by life, who grew up fatherless with his mother in a cramped two-room apartment and cared for her from the time of her cancer diagnosis until her death.
The young man’s name is Marcin. In the 1980s, his mother fled with him from Poland to Germany, worked as a geriatric caregiver, and struggled with addiction. While Marcin searches for his place in the world amid video games, nu metal, and poetry, the two live in a relationship that teeters between care and the abyss. With his mother’s illness, the family history comes to light in all its intensity: from memories, anecdotes, and painful realizations emerges a portrait of a German-Polish family in which war, migration, and social exclusion continue to have an impact into the present.
Lara Rüter: Affenliebe
Moderator: Katharina Knüppel
Lara Rüter read the notice on the bulletin board: “Temporary help wanted in primate research.” The poet spent five years in the monkey house at the Leipzig Zoo, and it is there that she anchors her reflections on closeness, loss, longing, and boundaries. Her essay “Affenliebe” (Hanser, 2026) explores the gap between humans and their closest relatives, reflecting the author’s personal experiences—including an abortion, during the preparation for which she felt the political pressure of what women are supposed to want—in the animals’ peculiar social behavior. The search for her biological father and her relationship with her “cuckoo father.” The result is a highly literary, permeable text that blends autobiographical and fictional narrative with quotations from Roland Barthes, Emily Dickinson, and Martina Hefter, alongside scholarly questions and scenes in the animal enclosure.
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Photos: Anja Gmeinwieser, Linda Sier, Martin Piekar, Charlotte Werndt, Lara Rüter, Michael Bader,
Sponsors: Freiburg City Cultural Office, Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts, Sparkasse Freiburg-Nördlicher Breisgau, Guzzoni-Federer Foundation, Deutsche Pfandbriefbank
Cooperation partners: Theater in the Marienbad, jos fritz bookstore
Cultural partner: SWR Kultur
Date: November 6, 2026, 6:00–8:00 p.m.
Location: Theater in the Marienbad, Marienstraße 4
Admission: 11/7 euros / Combo ticket (includes comic reading with Mia Oberländer) with a drink: 18/12 euros
Literary discussion
Off-site
