Landolf Scherzer: Die Kämpfs. Eine Thüringer Familiengeschichte oder Die große Kraft der kleinen Leute

In 1994, Landolf Scherzer met Marianne Stracke in the Thuringian Forest. The former LPG farmer was writing a history of her widely ramified Kämpf family, the tailors of Benshausen.

When she died in 2004, her son gave the writer more than 600 pages of letters, diaries and memories. But it was not until twenty years later that Scherzer sifted through the material. He repeatedly set off into the distance, searching everywhere for seeds of hope. In the collapse of utopias, he now explores the everyday stories of a family of unheroic heroes and discovers the great power of the little people: to remain human despite all constraints.

And so Scherzer also asks over 30 contemporaries, unknown and famous like Günter Wallraff, workers, teachers, politicians, diplomats, a mortician, a feces driver, doctors and entrepreneurs: What are "little people"?

Landolf Scherzer, born in Dresden in 1941, studied journalism in Leipzig; exmatriculated in 1966 due to overly truthful reportage; editor at "Freies Wort" in Suhl until 1975; then freelance writer; lives in Dietzhausen near Suhl. Like his predecessor Egon Erwin Kisch, a "roving reporter" who explores the world from below, with curiosity and anger at the injustices behind the prevailing law, both before and after 1989.

He has written over 30 books. Scherzer has traveled to China, crisis-ridden Greece, Cuba and Crimea to report on everyday experiences that are not in the world news.

His most recent journey of discovery took him to his neighboring village of Benshausen.

"Why am I interested in this family history? Because I have lost my utopias, hopes and simple truths for the present and future of the world? And now I want to find them again in the lives of the little people, in the stories of Marianne Stracke, née Kämpf?"

You can buy and have the book signed at the book table at the event.