Ricarda Lange - "The Most Beautiful Time"

School as a magnifying glass for society—and for one’s own life.

Walli Wolf is a primary school teacher by conviction, grappling with contradictions and pushed to her limits. Amid overcrowded classrooms, paperwork, and children who receive too little attention and shoulder too much, she tries every day to do the right thing. But the more she wears herself out, the more clearly she feels how closely her own life is tied to this place. The school becomes a mirror: of her background, her fears, her history. What Walli tries to give the children—attention, patience, trust—is something she herself has never experienced. When the disappearance of a colleague stirs memories of their shared childhood in a refugee settlement in northern Germany, what she has long suppressed comes to the surface: the legacy of a migration that extends into the present. *The Most Beautiful Time* tells, with narrative precision and poetic clarity, the story of a life caught between care and overwhelming demands, origin and adaptation, anger and dignity. A novel about everyday life within the school system—and about how the past and present are inextricably intertwined.

Moderator: Prof. Dr. Jörg Döring