Ariana Zustra - Uffmucke

Rising Star Ariana Zustra Reads and Plays Music The new project “Uffmucke,” a project by [das netz](https://kukav.de/portfolio/das-netz/), presents concerts outside the confines of traditional cultural venues in old and former country taverns; in this case, at the Ochsen in the open-air museum in Neuhausen. This concert is combined with a reading. Ariana Zustra has enjoyed equal success as an author of both music and prose. As a writer, Zustra published her debut novel “Tot oder lebendig”* in the fall of 2023 and was counted among the most important rising stars of the literary scene at the Frankfurt Book Fair. She was nominated for the 2024 German Pop Literature Prize and won the 2020 International Music Journalism Award for Best Lyric of the Year. “This Berlin-based artist, who moves as if in a dream in the footsteps of Florence Welch and P.J. Harvey, is definitely a discovery for internationally recognized indie pop from Germany,” wrote SPIEGEL about her solo project ZUSTRA. As a singer-songwriter, she creates cinematic art pop with a keen sense of the light and dark of our existence—or as the music blog Poule d’Or described it: “dark dream pop that develops into a full-blown James Bond theme song aesthetic.” [Ariana Zustra on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/zustra_music/?hl=de) *Synopsis: On the evening before her thirtieth birthday, Anna Thurow decides to die. Or at least she considers every possible method of suicide—but none seems quite right. She’s neither unhappy nor happy, but something has always felt strangely wrong to her: for instance, the fact that as a child she wanted to be an astronaut and now has a dreary office job somewhere in eastern Germany, and not least the lack of a penis between her legs. A hypnotist traces Anna’s sense of alienation from herself and the world back to a past life: the spirit of a Croatian Jew named Andri is said to be stirring within Anna. Anna thinks this is total bullshit, but her curiosity gets the better of her: she travels to Andri’s supposed hometown. Overwhelmed by the beauty of Dubrovnik, she meets Anka—who knew this Andri—through a contact in the Jewish community, and learns more and more about the wartime history of the former Yugoslavia and Nazi crimes. The first novel by musician and writer Ariana Zustra deals with repressed sites of the Shoah, as well as the boundaries of religion, identity, and sexuality. It is a novel that is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, about the attempt to explain oneself and the world, and about the question of who we can be when we don’t know who we are.