Tore Renberg & Annett Renneberg: Die Lungenschwimmprobe

Defense of a young woman accused of infanticide

The Erfurt Spring Reading picks up on the guest country Norway of the Leipzig Book Fair 2025 and has the Norwegian author Tore Renberg as a guest. Renberg is one of Norway's most popular and successful authors. He has won numerous awards and his books are published in 23 countries. His German reading voice at the event will be the popular actress Annett Renneberg, who is known to a wide audience for her role as Signorina Elettra Zorzi in the film adaptations of the Donna Leon novels "Commissario Brunetti" .

Leipzig in the year 1681: Fifteen-year-old Anna Voigt is on trial for allegedly killing her newborn baby. She is threatened with death - like many other girls and women of the time who are accused of similar crimes.
But Anna's powerful father stands up for her, and a doctor develops a new, spectacular scientific procedure that will go down in medical history as the "lung floatation test" and is regarded as the beginning of modern forensic medicine. This procedure is intended to prove that it was indeed a stillbirth, as Anna assures us, and not a murder. Can she be saved? "Die Lungenschwimmprobe" is a gripping historical novel about the collision of two worlds: The foothills of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of the Enlightenment, based on true events meticulously researched by the author in Leipzig.

German reading: Annett Renneberg
Moderation: Carsten Tesch (MDR)

In cooperation with Luchterhand Verlag and with the kind support of NORLA - Norwegian Literature Abroad