Winterberg's Last Journey

No one has ever told the history of Central Europe like this before. A train journey through a vanished land on the trail of a fated love.

Jan Kraus is a caregiver and takes care of the dying in Berlin. He comes from Vimperk and has lived in Germany since 1986. He spends the last moments of their lives with the dying. Sometimes it's just days, sometimes weeks, rarely months. One of those being transported to the other side is Wenzel Winterberg, a native of Liberec, who is as old as the crematorium there and the Czechoslovak Republic. The nearly 100-year-old man suffers from bouts of history, has worked as a tram driver all his life and has never studied, yet he knows a lot about history.

One day he asks Kraus to go with him on his last journey through Central Europe. Together, they travel by train from Berlin to Sarajevo, following an old baedeker for Austria-Hungary from 1913. They follow the trail of Winterberg's old love, Lenka, who went missing at the beginning of the last war. It's cold outside and old, long-forgotten stories come to life behind the train windows...

His books have been published in numerous translations abroad and he has received several awards for his work, including the prestigious German Literature House Prize (Preis der Literaturhäuser, 2018) and the Chamisso-Preis/Hellerau (2020). With artist Jaromír 99, he created the cult comic Alois Nebel, which was made into an animated film (European Film Award, 2012). He is a member of the Kafka Band. He is a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He lives in the Czech Republic and Germany and writes in both Czech and German. In 2019, a film adaptation of The National Class was released in cinemas, and at the same time the author published his first German-language novel Winterbergs letzte Reise, which will be published in Czech in autumn 2021 under the title Winterberg's Last Journey.

Source: velkyctvrtek.cz