A reportage that feels like a dazzling family novel about a country caught between tradition and modernity, Islamist threat and democratic hope
Alice Schwarzer first met Djamila, an Algerian journalist, in 1989. Like many others, Djamila had to live in fear for her life and emigrated to Germany for several years after the threat of an electoral victory by the Islamists and the civil war they incited in the 1990s, in which over 200,000 people died. But Djamila has parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces – whom Alice Schwarzer got to know and love in their homes at New Year’s celebrations, during holiday visits and at weddings. It is this family that Alice Schwarzer, together with the photographer Bettina Flitner, brings to life in all its diversity: the older generation, marked by the colonial period, war of independence and years of renewal when Algiers was the “Mecca of Revolution”; the generation that lived through the “black years” of Islamist terror and political repression; and the young people of today, caught between high heels and veils, Instagram and late-socialist stagnation.
