Grenzgänger

When law is not justice: Spiegel bestselling author Mechtild Borrmann with her masterpiece "Grenzgänger" about a dark chapter of German post-war history: children in care in the 50s and 60s. The multi-award-winning author Borrmann, whose contemporary history novels "Grenzgänger" and "Trümmerkind" were on the Spiegel bestseller list for months, tells the story of a life-hungry woman - a former home child - who believes in justice and despairs of it, with her own evocative and precise language. The Schönings live in a small village on the German-Belgian border. Like most families here in the 1950s and 1960s, the Schönings earn a little extra money by smuggling coffee. 17-year-old Henni, like many other children, has been involved from the beginning and is the one who knows the smuggling routes across the Hohe Venn, a treacherous moorland area. This allows her to guide the coffee smugglers, mainly children, through the dangerous moor at night. From 1950 onwards, more and more organized gangs take over the coffee smuggling business, and customs officers start shooting at people. Then one night the unthinkable happens: Henni's sister is shot dead. Henni is then sent to a reform school in 1951. For smuggling coffee. But that is only part of the truth. The younger siblings, whom Henni had taken care of in place of their dead mother, were sent to a church-run home. Where little Matthias dies of pneumonia. This, too, is only part of the truth. Borrmann knows how to combine suspense and contemporary history like no other German author. "Grenzgänger" is a gripping as well as stirring novel, embedded in a somber piece of contemporary history - the 50s and 60s in Germany. "As an impressive chronicler, Mechtild Borrmann penetrates the shadow worlds of contemporary German history in many voices. 'Grenzgänger' is about the search for truth.