Thank You For This Life
A human life. From birth to death. Maybe something will happen in the short period of our existence that will one day appear in the margins of a history book. Maybe it will even take up a whole page - though nothing else will be left of us.
Toto is born in East Germany. A strange unwanted child, unloved and mocked, he flees to the West and dies in Paris, sometime in the near future. Toto is a hermaphrodite, first a man and then a woman, and he/she questions both our gender stereotypes and everything that we think we know about the psyche of the humiliated: being rejected, not being loved, getting
sacked, getting beaten, as well as sickness, weakness, and loss. Toto knows right to the end that she is only one particle among billions, and that life is a miracle. She watches the world in wonder, and it seems a place full of brutality and hate. Toto doesn‘t defend herself, doesn‘t complain, and her life ends - with none of her dreams ful lled, and never having been loved - and yet still happy.
Toto is a monument to all the people on the margins of society, all the outsiders, the sick, the too fat, the too thin, the homosexuals, those who have to justify being who they are and loving who they love.
"In almost every chapter, at least one line shines out that is so amazing and surreal and at the same time of a special tenderness (…) an intensity emanates from the images of Berg's scenarios that defy comparison in all their harshness and obscure beauty."
Andrea Hannah Hünniger, Die Zeit
"Thank You For This Life is a furiously-written plea for otherness."
Regula Freuler, Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag
"Sibylle Berg sorts out good from evil, just before the final capitalist judgement. This isn't a novel, it's a manifesto."
Jan Küveler, Die Welt