Der heutige Tag:
Ein Stundenbuch der Liebe
('The day today:
A love's book of hours')
'Maybe, one of us will already no longer be here tomorrow.'
In this autobiographical novel, published last March, Helga Schubert writes with faith in the future about her everyday life which, in the past few years, has increasingly been governed by caring for her husband, who has dementia, in their house somewhere in Mecklenburg. They have been together for over fifty years. The couple's radius is constantly becoming more limited; visits from friends are becoming rarer, they are gradually becoming more and more dependent on each other.
In a tone that is as poetic as it is compelling, the author tells of the everyday hardships of being your partner's carer, of moments of happiness, and of how the recipient of this care can keep their dignity, and you your sanity, in such circumstances. Time and again, the story is interrupted by reminiscences.
Jutta Hoffmann reads from Der heutige Tag, a moving book about the things that make life worth living despite all of its difficulties, about love and about saying goodbye.
Helga Schubert was born in Berlin in 1940 and lived in the GDR, where she was a psychotherapist and author. After the publication of numerous books, she withdrew from the literary public until she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize with her story Vom Aufstehen ('On rising') in 2020. A volume of stories with the same title was published in 2021 and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
