Anna Depenbusch
and Ingo Schulze
Lebenslinien
('Life lines')
Two representatives of different genres: the singer and the author, the writer of poetic texts and the novelist, the composer and the chronicler meet for one evening and amalgamate their life lines into a blend of music and language.
Five studio albums, nationwide tours all over Germany with sold-out concerts in venues from the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg to the Prinzregententheater in Munich and countless awards speak for the success of the singer-songwriter Anna Depenbusch. She is the embodiment of her profession: a singing poet who writes authentic, approachable songs and developed her own unique style, somewhere in between Édith Piaf, Hildegard Knef and Björk, very early on. With her music, the Hamburg native tells stories full of emotion, poetry and her own experience of life. Her lyrics are tender, eloquent, deeply sad or incredibly funny.
Ingo Schulze, born in Dresden in 1962, is one of the most successful contemporary authors writing in the German language. Like the author himself once was, the protagonist Enrico Türmer in his epistolary novel New Lives is a member of the editorial staff of a 'reunification newspaper' in Altenburg in Thuringia. The work follows the course of Schulze's own life line relatively closely, and not only in this respect. Ingo Schulze turns out to be an important chronicler who inimitably evokes the lunacy and panorama of the world as it changed in the early nineties – when the world as we know it today was born. Türmer's controversial character may be read as an allegory for the changed freedoms and dependencies, for the dubiousness of the old and the new lives.
