I’ll Carry My Suitcase Myself

Despite the odds, a life which shouldn’t have been at all becomes colourful and exciting. Being a constant part of this life, farewells can be countered by encounters and stories though the feeling that this is all a game continues throughout unabated. Eva Demski gathers together others’ lives, those both known and unknown; leading lights of literature like Reich-Ranicki, Koeppen, Kempowski, and Rose Ausländer share their stories, but over and over again she also seeks out outsiders and finds them. She has her own dead poets society, too. Her early life in Regensburg is one of incense and cigarette smoke, then there’s the theatre, and becoming a young adult in politically instable times. These times become even more unstable, however, when her husband, a lawyer for the Red Army Faction, suddenly dies and the police become interested in her.

A very personal book filled with unsentimental memories of a life with its share of beautiful and terrible surprises, snapshots that reflect German history over the last few decades.

»Life and its baffling undulations, diversions, impositions, all of this Demski describes on 400 gripping, graceful pages.« Thorsten Schmitz, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Her memories are governed by sympathy and distance often laced with subtle mockery. They can also be read as a collection of outstanding journalistic texts.« Maria Frisé, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»[…] a surprisingly unemotional book, written with distance and great self-irony that can veer into reflective earnestness at any time.« Christoph Schröder, Der Tagesspiegel

»The writer leafs through her life. And she does so openly and directly, very down-to-earth. Demski doesn’t spare herself, ever.« Claus-Jürgen Göpfert, Frankfurter Rundschau

»[Demski‘s I’ll Carry My Suitcase Myself] is written with remarkable modesty and elegance […] Intellectual punchlines traverse her book; this, too, makes [her] journey through time such a stimulating reading pleasure.« SWR 2