About the work
Die Ausweichschule (literally “The Substitute School”) is Kaleb Erdmann's second novel, published by park x ullstein at the end of July 2025. The autofictional book centres on the school shooting at the Gutenberg-Gymnasium in Erfurt on 26 April 2002, which the author himself lived through as a fifth-grader at the school. Several stage versions have been announced; the first, adapted by Robin Ormond, is due to premiere at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar on 14 January 2027.
Plot
The unnamed first-person narrator was eleven when a former pupil shot sixteen people at his grammar school. More than twenty years later, now a writer, he sets out to write a book about that day and the time afterwards, including the lessons held in a temporary building, the substitute school of the title. His memories turn out to be patchy and mixed with press reports and other people's accounts. When a playwright interviews him several times because she is planning a play about the shooting, the question becomes more urgent of who may tell this story and whether writing it reopens old wounds.
Cultural significance
The novel was shortlisted for the German Book Prize in 2025 and won Erdmann the Bremen Literature Prize's award for emerging writers in 2026. Critics were divided: the Frankfurter Rundschau praised the novel's self-reflection and Deutschlandfunk the way it links autofiction with the question of how violence can be portrayed, whereas Die Zeit found the book weak in craft.