A hidden love story and the beginnings of writing.
Invited to a reading from his unfinished manuscript, the narrator travels to Mecklenburg in June 2025. This lake-rich landscape is the very place he called "the North" in the summer of 1979, the period his text is about. An unexpected encounter seems to bring his novella to life, raising the question of what was and what really is. Was he too young and too carefree for true love back then, and is it too late now? Have only illusions and utopias been lost, or also the aspirations and hopes that are missing from a present in which the old fear of war seems real once more? Perhaps the love story in Water in August is also a school of seeing, of recognising and of writing, and an attempt to come to terms with the world, with people and with one’s own history as accurately and vividly as possible.
"a literary event" - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Andreas Platthaus
