Farewell to Wiesken

While swinging across the meadows in the tractor, Bernd Vanwoldt shows his little daughter Anna on a map where the center of the world is located: at Deepen Grund, their farm, in the Catholic community of Wiesken in the seemingly remote Münsterland. "Nothing ever happened there," commented a city dweller fifty years later. Far from it. Throughout this multi-part epic, in which the author guides us through one and a half centuries of dynamic rural history, we dive into the fortunes of the smallholder family Vanwoldt and many other actors: craftsmen, estate owners, maids, workers, farmers' representatives, pastors, innkeepers, teachers, and many more. Their life stories are shaped not only by regional and German history but also by European and global events. Each era—the flourishing of the imperial period, two devastating world wars, the terror of the Nazi era, the fragile post-war period, the birth of the controversial EU agricultural policy from the start, the cultural upheaval of 1968, up to the late modern present—brought new opportunities, challenges, and destinies. In an empathetic narrative style, the author not only provides a multifaceted, historically grounded, as well as critical and wistful reflection on a rural peasant society that has irrevocably vanished, but also a highly relevant socio-political portrait that concerns people in both rural and urban areas alike. Maria Tekülve, who grew up in the Münsterland, is a PhD geographer, also studied sociology and agricultural economics, and now lives in Berlin. She spent her professional life in development cooperation with a focus on Africa, often relating to international rural policy. After numerous professional publications, she presents her first novel "Farewell to Wiesken" now in its third edition.