GERMAN BOOK PRIZE 2024
‘Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es Dir?’
‘Hey, good morning, how are you?’
Martina Hefter's novel 'Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es Dir?' (Hey, good good morning, how are you?) won the 2024 German Book Prize
A novel about loneliness, lies and love
November 2024: Juno, the heroine of the novel that won the German Book Prize 2024, (Deutscher Buchpreis 2024) helps her seriously ill husband, Jupiter, cope with his everyday life during the day. She is also an artist, dances and plays theatre. And at night, when she can't sleep again, she chats with love scammers on the internet. Author Martina Hefter has written a touching novel about needs and desires in life. And about how far one is prepared to go for love.
In Martina Hefter's novel ‘Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es Dir?’ (‘Hey, good morning, how are you?’), the reader meets Juno, who chats with men online. These men confess their love to women and try to trick them out of their money. But instead of falling for it, these very men become a form of freedom for Juno. In the conversations, she can be who she wants and say what she wants - and supposedly without consequences. This is in stark contrast to her other life, in which she is always on the move, always worried about her husband Jupiter, and always busy and involved. So Juno occasionally escapes from her everyday life onto the internet and plays games with men who lie to her. She also becomes a liar.
One day, Juno meets Benu, a Nigerian man, who sees through her claims just as she sees through his. And despite the distance between them, a connection develops. ‘Hey, good morning, how are you’ is a profound novel but as light-footed as a comedy. The novel is also about ageing, colonialism, longing, friendship and love. The author deals with these major themes laconically and delicately.
Deutschlandfunk writes about ‘Hey Good morning, how are you?' by Martina Hefter:
“The German police are issuing an urgent warning about love scammers. Their website states: ‘’Love scamming' or “romance scamming” is the modern form of marriage fraud. Scammers create fake profiles on social media platforms or dating portals and pretend to be in love. In the end, however, they only have one goal: they want to get their victims' money!’
Author and dance performer Martina Hefter, who hails from the Allgäu region, must have thought she could capitalise on this in a literary way. In her new novel ‘Hey good morning, how are you?’, she sends her heroine into the world of fake flirts.
Juno Isabella Flock is a woman in her mid-fifties who lives in Leipzig and works as an independent dancer. A dancer without spatial orientation, however, who lives with a man suffering from a severe form of multiple sclerosis. A woman who repeatedly escapes into the dance hall to experience weightlessness. A man for whom a journey by train becomes a high-performance exercise that he could hardly manage without his wife. Juno and Jupiter are the names of the two in the novel.
This is not a harmless invention: in the author's life, there is her husband, the author Jan Kuhlbrodt, who suffers from the same illness. While Jupiter lies in his nursing bed, Juno begins a double life with her love scammer in the next room - fully aware of the artificiality of the situation. It's not just the marriage scammer with the chic profile picture of a white senior employee who constructs an illusory world. Juno also uses the exchange to be someone else.
It is not the quality of the dialogue with which the author scores points. Rather, it is the complete lack of originality that brings our neediness to light in a sobering way. What is it that makes women fall in droves into the nets of such swindlers, most of whom are not middle-class white men from Europe but poor black men from Africa?
Just like Benu from a medium-sized Nigerian town in the south of the country, where the electricity is switched off from 11 p.m., which is why the video calls that the two soon switch to are played by candlelight.
Benu, who now recognises himself for who he is, becomes a witness to a false identity in this pose. For him, Juno is a woman with many lovers, without a husband, a successful dancer in her prime, and, in short, a woman to fall in love with!
Martina Hefter has choreographed her text. She plays around with different versions of a personality, different states, and different moral standpoints in a language that doesn't shy away from moments of bleakness any more than the love scammers do: stale compliments, pseudo-deep meaning about the stars, dullness about dance training. Strangely enough, however, the tedium in this novel remains the programme.
Neither Benu's story nor at least his perspective is told (he only changes numbers one day), nor that of a woman who cares for her sick husband and lives a different concept of love here. Nor has this become a text about the language of the body. Juno can praise her long dancing legs as often as she likes. All this would only be half as wild if Hefter didn't also want to criticise capitalism and power.”
In the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Ulrich Noller writes about ‘Hey, Good morning, how are you?’ by Martina Hefter.
“With playful ease into the shallows of life, poetic and precise, Martina Hefter's autofictional novel tells a very personal story of the present.
Martina Hefter tells a love triangle story, but with a silent partner: Juno, around 50, is a dancer and performance artist who lives with her partner in Leipzig under precarious circumstances as a cultural worker. Her husband is the person in the next room, whom she looks after and cares for because he is chronically ill. Jupiter, as she calls him, remains pale; he plays a role more in outline.
Juno is attentive and loving; however, she is also fully committed, and her caring responsibilities regulate and determine her life. She finds freedom online By communicating with love scammers, guys who use fake profiles to build relationships with lonely women to siphon off their wealth. At least virtually, Juno has such wealth, and she takes the freedom to play her games, just as the scammers play with her.
But then she ‘meets’ Benu, a 32-year-old from Nigeria. The two find something about each other; a virtual relationship develops out of the games, which increasingly develops elements of something ‘real’. Where can this lead?
‘Hey, good morning, how are you?’ is many things in one: an artist's novel, a memoir, a diagnosis of the times, a relationship story. Martina Hefter conjures up all these dimensions with a light hand, playfully, focussed, precise and always highly poetic as she juggles the balls over the abyss of life's shallows - her own life. Well, at least to a certain extent, it is a semi-fictional text that dances on the edge.”
The German Book Prize
The German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis) is presented to the best German-language novel just before the start of the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. The Prize is intended to draw attention beyond national borders to authors writing in German. Publishing companies can apply for the award by direct nomination of their titles. Unusually, titles still in production when applications are first invited can also be included in the selection process. Furthermore, the German Book Prize represents the guarantee of independent and competent prize judgment: the seven jurors will personally assess all the books that are submitted and that meet the criteria for consideration.
On other pages: | Hertha Gordon-Walcher | Martin Walser | German Book Prize 2023 |
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