Literary insights into precarious working environments

Location

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Author Heike Geißler, who grew up in Chemnitz, and Prague-based writer Anna Beata Háblová tell the story of women who have to earn their living doing monotonous jobs at a supermarket checkout and in a huge warehouse respectively. During their humdrum work, they reflect on their lives, dreams and goals. Both authors provide knowledgeable insights into the working world of those who make mass consumption possible and transform them into often astonishingly poetic literature. In 2014, Heike Geißler published Saisonarbeit, a fictionalised account of her six-week stint as a temporary worker at Amazon. She describes the depersonalised world of work so vividly that you feel like you're standing right next to her as you read. Anna Beata Háblová lets her protagonist Petra speak in her prose text Směna (Engl. "The Shift") from 2022. She is a young artist full of self-doubt who does not feel up to the arrogant art world and therefore works as a cashier in a supermarket. But here, too, she faces a daily struggle.