Ingo Schulze Water in August

Ingo Schulze’s new novel *Das Wasser im August* is perhaps his most personal book to date: it tells of a youth spent in the GDR, of a time when hope for the country’s future still seemed possible, and of the artistic awakening of a young man who aspires to become a writer.

Invited to give a reading from an unfinished manuscript, the narrator travels to Mecklenburg in June 2025, to that familiar lakeside landscape from the summer of 1979, which forms the setting for the text he is reading. An unexpected encounter brings the past to life: a former love, old companions and memories of a light-heartedness that seems to have been lost in the decline of socialism, the Peaceful Revolution and the contradictory experiences of the post-reunification era.

Ingo Schulze was awarded the 2026 Uwe Johnson Prize for *Das Wasser im August*. Together with Helmut Böttiger, who received the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize this year, Ingo Schulze discusses questions such as: What is memory, what is invention, what is truth? And what remains of the hopes and utopias of a bygone era?

• Academy member Thomas Lehr will deliver the welcome address.