What to do with me

After her bestselling works Christiane und Goethe, Das Leben des Friedrich Schiller, Goethes letzte Reise and with a total number of one million copies sold, Sigrid Damm presents a new work that invites the reader to a journey through her personal life.

A quest for happiness, a journey of self-discovery

It is the last year of the last millennium. High in the wind-whipped north, a woman finds her center in the landscape of unending wideness and peace surrounding her; her story is contained within this wilderness. An unexpected invitation for a half year’s fellowship in Rome, however, shakes her from tranquility.

Rome in the grips of Millennium fever. Noise, exhaust, cascading tourists. For her, the Eternal City is a giant monitor simultaneously streaming thousands of pictures. She doesn’t feel welcome. It is only in the parks of the Villa Borghese, standing before the Caravaggio paintings in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, or with the sons who come to visit her that she finds some moments of happiness.

Yet the more time she spends in the south, the more she begins to succumb to its allure. In Rome, she meets Baschal, a young Congolese porter in the Trinità dei Monti. There’s the German bookseller in the Piazza Montecitorio and Fulio and Anna, an old married couple. She follows the footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann and encounters the composer Hans Werner Henze. And Johann Wolfgang Goethe is recurrent, not only in the name of her residence, the Casa di Goethe. Her travels take her through Sperlonga, to Monte Circeo on the Tyrrhenian Sea, from Lago Maggiore to Venice, and from Genoa and Palermo to Syracuse.

As she wanders through the south, hidden memories surface: the honeymoon to Cuba, remembrances of Che Guevara, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and her early years of living in Lapland. Reflection on a life woven together becomes a journey of discovery. Who am I, where do I want to go? An intimate and thoughtful book in which the search for happiness is a story told with great poetic grace.