Nina Pauer is a young author people read. She writes about gender roles, social networks and pop music for the Hamburg-based national weekly Die ZEIT. And if her column isn’t big enough to contain her thoughts on the anxieties of today’s thirty-somethings, she publishes them in books. Nina Pauer was born in Hamburg in 1982 to college-educated, left-wing parents. As an only child, she enjoyed her parents’ undivided attention and a largely carefree childhood - with the exception of a background sense of doom resulting from the stream of reports on acid rain, the Chernobyl disaster, the ozone hole, YK2 and the Gulf War. But Armageddon failed to materialize - at least in Germany. 30-year-old Nina Pauer insiststhat is precisely why her generation is relatively free of existential fears. She seems to like touching off debates with her style column, writing f. ex. about young men who would rather strum sad love songs on the guitar than gather experience on the topic for themselves. She labels this species "pain men”, and they’ve become a subject of heated debate on the internet and in panel discussions. So far, Nina Pauer has only left her home town Hamburg to study for a brief time in Bordeaux. She can hardly imagine living without a sea or harbor.