Marlen Hobrack: "Best in class. What remains of my mother's work"

Marlen Hobrack radically reformulates the class question from a female perspective, against an East German background in an all-German reality.
Along the biography of her mother, who worked her way up from the "lumpenproletariat" to the working class in the GDR, Marlen Hobrack tells of a life that offered few prospects despite supposed equality: the involuntary "parachute mother", single East German parent and "woman of her class" was unable to pay her bills despite hard work. How did the milieu and myths of her background affect Hobrack's own biography as a journalist who became a mother at 19? And how did she experience her personal liberation from class shame and exclusion?

Marlen Hobrack, born in Bautzen in 1986, studied literature, cultural and media studies and then worked for a management consultancy. Since 2016, she has been writing full-time for newspapers and magazines, including Freitag, Die Zeit, Die Welt and the art magazine Monopol. Her debut novel "Schrödinger's Grrrl" was published by Berlin-based Verbrecher Verlag in 2023. Marlen Hobrack lives and writes in Leipzig.