Felicitas Hoppe Johanna S. Fischer Verlag, August 2006, 176 pp ISBN: 3-10-032450-1 I don't know anything about helmets. Their weight from top to bottom oppresses me, why do you need a roof over your head? I'm dreaming of a modest storm, like a nut dreaming of being cracked, so that I can finally awake, so that finally everything can come to the surface, everything about which Joan knows nothing… This latest book by Felicitas Hoppe is based on the life of Joan of Arc, but not as a retelling, even an unconventional one, but as a startling attempt to interpret her motivations. The voice of the narrator is that of a young academic grappling with this enigma. Other characters are a fellow academic, confident and mocking, whom she nicknames The Whip, and the ambivalent and exacting figure of the Professor, who is never content with the answers to the questions he poses. Who really was Joan? Why did she do what she did? By juxtaposing her medieval world against our modern one, the author forces us to ask the same question about ourselves. There are real and imagined dialogues, dreams, odes to Joan. There is Joan whose father would rather drown her than let her go with the soldiers, who looks ridiculous in her battle helmet, uses coarse language and is mocked as a cow-maid and a whore. And against her courage and stubbornness there is the narrator, her antithesis - highly literate, questioning, constantly doubting, full of fear. Two different worlds indeed. Joan lived in an age characterised by faith, by belief in the saints and in strange voices. That in which our modern academic lives and breathes believes only what can be proved or what is tangible. It is this shift that has turned Joan from a heroine of the past into the enigma of our age and of this novel. Hoppe's language is richly poetic, building on an array of leitmotif images and phrases and venturing some bold transitions - modern academics becoming valiant knights, and so on. At the same time her sentences are deceptively simple yet always containing a twist. She is one of the most interesting, exciting stylists at present at work in Germany and this remarkable novel shows what that implies.