Journalist and writer Hannah Lühmann is a guest of the Literaturhaus Stuttgart with her new book Heimat. The novel, published in 2025, describes the radicalization of a young, liberal, urban mother into a ‘tradwife’. The term evokes an idea of femininity that has been presented and propagated by social media influencers throughout the 2020s—a new lifestyle approach that finds women’s fulfillment in household work, raising children, and subordination to men, often underpinned by rightwing and racist ideologies. 

Lühmann discusses the topic with writer and researcher Mithu Sanyal. In her literary and academic texts, Sanyal takes a clever and original approach to images of femininity, forms of sexualized violence, everyday racism, and postcolonialism. Among other works, she contributed to the 2019 anthology Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum [Your homeland is our nightmare], a critical analysis of the present from a post-migrant perspective. In a conversation moderated by Vatan Ukaj of WERTansich(t), the authors discuss conceptions of Heimat, gendered images, longing, and illusion. 

With: Hannah Lühmann and Mithu Sanyal, moderated by Vatan Ukaj

An initiative of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of heimaten, supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and a collaboration between WERTansich(t), StadtPalais Stuttgart, Black Community Foundation Stuttgart e. V., Deutsch-Kurdisches Forum e. V., and Literaturhaus Stuttgart