Meine Schwester

When the photographer Bettina Flitner learned of her beloved sister's suicide a few years ago, her initial reactions were shock, paralysis, and despair. But then she chose to tell the story. The result is a deeply moving, masterful text, a book of liberation. With an unyielding gaze trained in photography, full of devotion, wit, and sadness, Bettina Flitner narrates the story of an intimate sibling relationship: a childhood in the 1970s, years at a Waldorf school, memories of charismatic grandparents, including a famous reform pedagogue, a father who was a cultural manager and exponent of the left-liberal educational bourgeoisie of the old Federal Republic of Germany, a year in New York, vacations in Capri, and the first romantic adventures of adolescence. And then the cracks: the overwhelming pressures of the parents' lives marked by sexual libertinism, the mother's descent into depression, the unfulfilled professional expectations of the parents for their daughters. Bettina Flitner's book is an admirably brave step to confront the ghosts of a shared past, to free herself from them, and thus to process the death of loved ones. It is a book about a topic that remains shrouded in taboos and silence for many people.