Sibylle Berg

Book

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Wonderful Years

When We Still Travelled The World

This collection of updated travel essays is the book of our times. A sad memory of a past when travelling still meant finding yourself in the world, and wasn‘t a mix of humiliating torment and survival training. When we think of Paris today, images of the past still predominate in our minds - there are no armies with machine guns, no Bataclan, no constant abuse of women. We think of streets without homeless pensioners who can‘t be cared for by the so-called welfare state, and without Metros filled with tired people who can‘t afford an apartment in the city anymore. The stories take place on cruise ships and on the Orient Express, which the author ed after a day, they tell of a friendly kidnapping in Myanmar and of drunken Icelanders. It‘s a shame that travelling is barely any fun any- more - but it‘s good we don‘t have to as long as we have this book.

"She is a moralist among contemporaries, a great comedian, a member of a species that cannot go extinct, surrounded by all the other comedians and their constant state of excitable silliness."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"The joy of travelling is always on the margins, never in the fulfilment of cliché. The wisdom of the well-travelled is always tied up with Sibylle Berg’s wanderlust."

Süddeutsche Zeitung