The Giraffe’s Neck
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Adaption is everything, something Frau Lohmark is well aware of as the biology teacher at the Charles Darwin High School in a country backwater of the former East Germany.
A strict devotee of Darwin’s evolution principle, Lohmark views education as survival of the fittest: classifying her pupils as biological specimens and scorning her colleagues for indulging in ‘favourites’. However, as people move West in search of work and opportunities, the school’s future is in jeopardy and the Lohmark is forced to face her most fundamental lesson: she must adapt or she cannot survive.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Judith Schalansky tells the psychological profile of an East German biology teacher in her fifties, which exhausts herself in dealing with school colleagues and pupils. Schalansky describes how the view of her hero’s world gets mixed up. At the same time, she tells in an elegant and virtuous style the crisis history of a region that goes through a change.