On the final day of the high school graduation exams in 2002, shots are fired at the Gutenberg Gymnasium in Erfurt. Our narrator experiences the day as an eleven-year-old, is evacuated along with his classmates, and in the weeks that follow, witnesses the helplessness of the adults confronted with the event.

More than twenty years later, the incident resurfaces in his life – suddenly and unexpectedly – triggering an obsessive engagement with the subject that eventually leads to a novel project. But why reopen old wounds after so many years? Does he even have the right to do so? What about his memories – what stories has he told so often that they’ve become truth?

Kaleb Erdmann’s novel »Die Ausweichschule« (The Alternative School) is a masterful play with perspective: a work of autofiction that is both critical of its audience (how voyeuristic is our interest in processing acts of violence?) and of the author himself (what gives me the right to write about that day?).

A pointed, deeply personal, and haunting text about a phenomenon that continues to trouble us across the world.