Enis Maci
Eiscafé Europa
Released 21 January 2026 (English Edition)
When did Europe's ghosts return? And how can we dispel them? In Eiscafé Europa, Enis Maci weaves together memory, politics, literature, and history, creating a tapestry of a threadbare continent. She retraces a youth spent among the ruins of the coal age, and turns to gender traitors and enemies of the state––Joan of Arc and Sophie Scholl, Albania’s long-gone sworn virgins and the Jewish nun Edith Stein. Maci questions mother tongue and origin, and dissects the Identitarian Movement’s fascist lineage, media strategies and make-up techniques. Described as ‘razor-sharp, wonderfully meandering, incredibly entertaining and unsettling at the same time’, (Spiegel Online), Eiscafé Europa is a work of poetic precision.
“Reading this book felt like meeting up with a friend you haven’t seen in years. Over drinks at your old go-to, Café Deutschland I, you’re proffered explicit insights into their life, incisive comments on the contemporary German identitarian movement, and off-the-cuff aphorisms. While you’re distracted, the café has changed hands and names; it might be called Café Deutschland II now.
There is something of Moyra Davey in this conversation, but with an Eastern European attitude. Maci quotes Dworkin rather than Benjamin, yet similarly situates images, here rendered in language, within the urgencies of contemporary political and social life. When you leave the café, you glance back at the shop sign, now blinking in neon: Eiscafé Europa.” –––Camissa Buerhaus
“Enis Maci's Eiscafé Europa excavates the Germany of the late 1990s and 2000s—an overlooked period crucial to understanding today's debates over identity, migration, and the far right. By bringing Maci's poetic and sharp analysis to English readers, this translation reveals how the specters haunting contemporary Europe were summoned in decades barely gone but already historicised and instrumentalised.” –––Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff
“I couldn’t recommend Eiscafé highly enough—it’s nonchalant in its rhyming code-switches, but also stirring, biting, most of all obsessive in analyzing the young avatars of German neofascism (not to mention generous with its sources, too). As text, it somehow matches the clip and breadth of hyperlink thinking, without the brain-spitting jitters of life among images. A translation worthy of its postscript!” –––Patrick Kurth
“I love this collection. Reading Eiscafé Europa is like shaking a snow globe and peering inside. A few years ago it turned the German-language essay upside down. May it now do the same in English.” –––Mathias Zeiske
Enis Maci (b. 1993, Gelsenkirchen) is the author of the essays Eiscafé Europa and Karl May, the novel Pando, and a number of plays, including WUNDER. Her work has been staged, among others, at Volksbühne Berlin, Schauspielhaus Vienna, and Sala Beckett in Barcelona.
She has received numerous awards, most recently the Max Frisch Prize for Emerging Writers. She edited the interdisciplinary volumes A Fascinating Plan and Filamentous Magic Carpets. Currently, she is completing a PhD at the University of Zurich on AI authorship.