The Bureau of Past Management

Hanika, IrisIris Hanika, born in Würzburg in 1962, has lived in Berlin since 1979. She received the prestigious Hans Fallada Prize in 2006. Her novel "Treffen sich zwei" was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2008. "The Bureau of Past Management" was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature and the LiteraTour Nord Prize. She was a resident at the Villa Massimo in Rome in 2017/18. Her most recent novel "Echos Kammern" won the Hermann Hesse Literature Prize in 2020 and the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Award in 2021.Wender, AbigailAbigail Wender is a poet and translator. Her debut poetry collection "Reliquary" was published in 2021. She lives in New York City.

Each of us has something that feels essential to who we are. For Hans Frambach, it's the crimes of the Nazi era, which have hurt him for as long as he can remember. That's why he became an archivist at the Bureau of Past Management; now, though, he's wondering if he should make a change. For his best friend, Graziela, that past was also her focal point - until she met a man who desired her. From then on, sexual pleasure became the key to her life; a concept she's now beginning to doubt. Hans and Graziela thought the Nazi crimes were the inheritance that neither could bear, but can we really blame Nazism for everything?Iris Hanika shows how the crimes of the Nazi era hold the Germans in their clutches to this day, and the absurdities to which institutionalising commemoration leads.Can a country manage its past, or ought we to remain helpless in the face of the horrific crimes of the Holocaust?