LIVING FAREWELL: Diary of a Sense of Time

  • A literary essay about great and small farewells, grief, comfort, and also hope in a world full of crisis.
  • 20,000 copies sold.
  • 200,000 copies sold of her books Das Leben ist ein vorübergehender Zustand and Der Trost der Schönheit (rights sold to the Netherlands (Balans), Russia (Azbooka) and Taiwan (Common Master Press)).
  • Excellent English sample translation available.

Farewell is always and everywhere. Every evening we say goodbye to the day. Every morning we bid farewell to the night. We part with jobs, seasons, apartments, dreams, cities – with youth, strength, time, with untouched nature, with earlier versions of ourselves. Children go out into the world, parents into death, lovers to the next woman or man. No one escapes the final farewell anyway. “Sometimes I practice dying”, writes the author.
And now we are also saying farewell to the certainty of peace and to the certainty of liberal democracy. Farewells are our daily companions and teachers. But farewell is not only loss and sadness – it can also be liberating. Far too often we forget the new beginning that lies within farewell. We overlook the freedom that comes with uncertainty.
In her diary, Gabriele von Arnim writes for a year about farewells – about fears of the present and the struggle to maintain confidence in the future, about farewells from oneself, from the joy of life, and about the inevitability of the final farewell.

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  • Publisher: Rowohlt Hardcover
  • Release: 17.04.2026
  • ISBN: 978-3-498-00776-8
  • 272 Pages
  • Author: Gabriele von Arnim

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Buchcover von LIVING FAREWELL: Diary of a Sense of Time: Tagebuch eines Zeitgefühls
Gabriele von Arnim LIVING FAREWELL: Diary of a Sense of Time
Portrait von Gabriele von Arnim
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Gabriele von Arnim

Gabriele von Arnim was born in Hamburg in 1946. She studied, completed her doctorate and spent ten years working in New York as a freelance journalist. She has published several books and lives in Berlin.