Book premiere "Cookbook of the Dead" - Ulrike Gies

A special event – ​​the book premiere of Ulrike Gies’ “Cookbook of the Dead”!

Ulrike Gies remembers. Pear compote, meat rolls with onions and beer, an Indonesian menu with seventeen courses, butter cream cake and cauliflower. Taste and smell outlive everything that would otherwise have long since decayed, and just as it once happened to Proust, whose childhood returns to him when he eats a madeleine, burnt dumplings or lentil soup also take Gies back to times gone by. She takes us there on a culinary journey - through her stomach into the past, but also into her everyday life today, her dreams and experiences.

In fragments, associative, open and often abrupt, white beans evoke memories, sustain the life of the dead, even though the parents have long since died, so has their great love, and the body is trapped in a wheelchair. Soberly, mercilessly, she describes her mother's illness, her disgusting uncle, her aunt's funeral, conversations at the table, or the family next door, and humorously and dryly dissects her own life. Reflections on death and life run through the book like aphorisms –
the theme of food: a framework for the memoirs.