Eine Liebe am Tiber

Jan Koneffke
Eine Liebe am Tiber - A Love at the Tiber

A Novel
314 pages

"A Love at the Tiber" is a tragic-comical family- and love story. The novel tells of a German longing taking grotesque dimensions, the longing for Italy, for the turbulent city at the Tiber in the late sixties.

Ludwig Wieland, a former transport glider pilot of the Wehrmacht, arrives in Rome with his wife Elinor and his two children Lisa and Sebastian to take on his teaching position at the German school in Rome. He cannot get rid of the persistent rumour of being a Mussolini-liberator. In politics he is not interested at all. Being a true “Bildungsbürger” he writes sonnets and collects antique potsherds. With his inordinate passion for antique objects he step by step ruins his existence – and looses his wife, called “Feelein” (“little fairy”). His wife lives a dramatic love in the middle of Rome’s colourful bohème and between the anarchic student Luca and the cynical nobleman Frangipane. A Love at the Tiber tells from the point of view of the adolescent son Sebastian in fellinesque pictures and scenes of the changes and hopes in a strangely distant time – Sebastian, who discovers first secret love behind the wooden cellar partition with the neighbour’s daughter Lili Sassolino.

A quarter of a century later this son will learn the dreadful truth about his parent’s years at the Tiber. He will learn to understand and to forgive: “Yes, I believe that my life only now begins.”