Leipzig liest - Cordt Schnibben: Lila Eule – Die Show Wie der Beat nach Deutschland kam

In the organizer's words:

Author and legendary Spiegel reporter Cordt Schnibben presents his debut novel "Lila Eule" (Purple Owl) - at first glance a tricky German-German love story: Carl from Bremen, 18 years old, falls in love with Mara from East Berlin, but is not allowed to see her for 17 years; after the fall of the Wall, Carl searches for his great love in the chaos of disintegrating socialism, because the state that stole her from him can no longer prevent him from doing so.

At second glance, it's a bizarre agent story: Mara's father was a Stasi officer working in the West and thought Carl was an LSD dealer and West German informer who was being set up; that's why he first had him thrown into prison and then out of the GDR.

And then there is the rousing story of the uprising in sofa-cushion Germany: Carl and his friends Sylwia and Sigi were cable carriers in the Bremen cult show "Beat Club", lay at the feet of Jimi Hendrix, Tina Turner and Janis Joplin, hear the vibration of a new era in their songs and believe in the creative power of LSD.

Finally, the story of a strange friendship: the three fell out in the early seventies because Carl climbed over the wall to take revenge on his Nazi father; they lost sight of each other, found each other again after the fall of the wall in the anarchist techno scene of East Berlin; they give an account of what became of the hopes of their rebelliousness: why is man clever enough to recognize how he can make the world a better place, but stupid enough to fail again and again?

The funny thing is that everything is connected in a strange way, everything happened in exactly the same way. Except for what should have happened.

Cordt Schnibben: Lila Eule. A German-German love story, an agent story, a novel like a beautiful LSD trip / CORRECTIV-Verlag

About the author:

Cordt Schnibben was born in Bremen in 1952. Studied economics. He worked as an advertising copywriter for a while before graduating from the Henri Nannen School. In 1984, he started as an editor at "Die Zeit". In 1989, he moved to "Spiegel", for which he traveled the world as a reporter, headed the monthly magazine "Spiegel Reporter" and then the society section. He developed the magazine's app and many new digital, multimedia narrative forms for the editorial team. Schnibben has received numerous awards, including the Theodor Wolff Prize, the Egon Erwin Kisch Prize, the Henri Nannen Prize, the German Television Drama Prize and twice the Adolf Grimme Prize. He is the author and editor of several non-fiction books. In 2007, together with Stephan Lebert and Ariel Hauptmeier, he founded the Reporter Forum, and in 2008 the German Reporter Award. He has headed the Reporter Factory at CORRECTIV since 2018.