Veronika Peters

Veronika Peters (2011)

Veronika Peters (* 1966 in Gießen ) is a German writer.

Life

Veronika Peters spent her childhood in Germany and Africa, left her parents' home at an early age and initially worked as an educator in child and adolescent psychiatry. During this time she was involved in the left youth movement and had contacts with the Frankfurt squatter scene .

In 1987 she entered a German Benedictine abbey, where she made solemn profession in 1993 . Furthermore, she completed a distance learning course in theology in order to subsequently work as the head of the book and art shop of the monastery, for whose redesign and expansion she was essentially responsible.

As part of this work, she met the writer Christoph Peters , with whom she has been married since 2001. She left the monastery in 1999 and has lived in Berlin as a freelance writer ever since. Since September 2011, Peters and Hilal Sezgin have been the moderator at the “Literary Evening” in Berlin, a series of events organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in cooperation with the Deutsches Theater .

reception

In her debut novel What fits in two suitcases. Klosterjahre , published in 2007, the author works through her years as a Benedictine . The identity of their former monastery and the names of their fellow sisters are obscured by deliberately false references. The work has long been on the non-fiction bestseller list and has been widely discussed by literary critics. There were different reactions from the Catholic religious orders . It is emphasized that the author clears up numerous romanticizing illusions about monastic life and thus contributes to a more realistic picture of this way of life in the 21st century. At the same time, it is noted by critics that the author shows little or no signs of her own spiritual life and one can therefore rightly ask why she entered the monastery in the first place.

Works

• What fits in two suitcases. Monastery years . Goldmann-Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-442311-16-0
• Nobody thought of Paris . Goldmann-Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-442-31167-5
• The sea in gold and gray . Goldmann-Verlag, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-442-31168-2
• The love within limits . Goldmann-Verlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-442-31320-4
• Every beginning falls from the sky . Goldmann-Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-442-31321-1
• The lady behind the curtain . Wunderraum-Verlag, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-336-54808-8

Web links

Commons : Veronika Peters  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Veronika Peters in the catalog of the German National Library
• Article about Peters in "Stern" from March 18, 2007
• Article about Peters in the FAZ of April 8, 2007
• Book review on Deutschlandradio on June 13, 2007
• Veronika Peters Nobody thought of Paris , report about Peters' second novel on hr-online.de
• Official website of the author