Hurry, Your Life

Louise grows up in France, Johann in West Germany. They meet at a French university, marry, move to a German village, watch their children grow up and their parents die. For a entire lifetime, they look for words to describe a time that no one ever wanted to talk about.

With great clarity and force, Sylvie Schenk tells the simple story of a young woman from the French Alps who falls in love with a German during her studies. In her new home, everything is difficult and her husband behaves quite differently from when they first met. At the same time, Louise begins to discover more about the past of her authoritarian father-in-law who spent the war in France.

Hurry, your Life is a discovery by a writer who came to Germany more than fifty years ago and had to wait the same length of time until she was able to write this particular novel – a story of liberation, a new view of Germany and a book about life.