Hard Language About the Things Nobody Admits

Nadine Kroll spent years writing for this journal before she wrote a book. She was in her early twenties, freshly arrived in Berlin from somewhere smaller and more provincial, and she used this space to work through what that meant—the clubs, the parties, the gradual discovery that she was allowed to want things and didn’t have to apologize for any of it.

Stellungswechsel collects that sensibility into something longer and more deliberate. The subject is sex, love, and the significant territory in between: sexting, non-traditional relationship structures, the specific appetites that plenty of people in their twenties quietly carry but publicly deny out of fear of what anyone might think. Nadine doesn’t soften any of it. Her language is hard and unsparing—the kind of writing that doesn’t perform frankness but simply is frank, which is much harder to pull off than it sounds.

There’s something genuinely useful about someone who writes about these things without the confessional sentimentality that usually comes attached. No lessons, no redemption arc, no transformation into a wiser person. Just the experience, described with precision. That’s what made her writing here worth reading, and presumably what makes the book worth finding.