Charlotte Roche

Charlotte Roche
Charlotte Roche during a reading in Berlin, 2007
Born	Charlotte Elisabeth Grace Roche 18 March 1978 (1978-03-18) (age 33) High Wycombe, England
Spouse	Eric Pfeil Martin Keß (2007–present)
Children	daughter Polly (2002) with Eric Pfeil
Website
www.charlotteroche.de

Charlotte Elisabeth Grace Roche (born 18 March 1978 in High Wycombe, England) is a British-born German television presenter, actress, singer and author.^[1]

Life and career

Roche, who is bilingual in English and German, is the daughter of an engineer and a politically and artistically active mother. She has lived in Germany since the age of eight, having previously lived in London and the Netherlands. She grew up in the Lower Rhine region, in a family with liberal views. Her primary school was in Niederkrüchten. In 1989 she went to the secondary school, St. Wolfhelm Gymnasium, in the neighbouring town of Schwalmtal. When she was 14 years old she moved to Mönchengladbach, where she was educated at the Hugo Junkers Gymnasium in the suburb of Rheydt. She left school after the 11th grade, at the age of 17. She obtained initial stage experience in drama groups during her time at school.

Roche left home in 1993 and founded with three female friends the garage rock group The Dubinskis. The members performed several intimate gigs in a small tour before the two other members pulled out. There followed a period where she undertook anything that would shock and offend people — self mutilation in order to paint with blood, drug experiments, or shaving her head. After successfully auditioning for the German music channel Viva, she worked there for several years as a video jockey and presenter, as well on the sister channel Viva Zwei, where she presented her show Fast Forward.

Roche has a daughter, Polly, born in 2002, whose father Eric Pfeil was the producer and writer of Roche's programme Fast Forward and Der Kindergeburtstag ist vorbei! (The birthday party is over). Since 2007, Roche has been married to Martin Keß, co-founder of Brainpool, a media company in Cologne.

In 2006, Roche played the female lead (alongside Josef Ostendorf) in the German film Eden, directed by Michael Hofman. The film was widely distributed in Europe.

In an interview published in Der Spiegel in 2010, Charlotte Roche proposed to have sex with German president Christian Wulff in exchange for his veto on a new regulation extending the life of nuclear reactors, highlighting the controversial extension, and Wulff's role in passing it into law.^[2][3]

Writer

Roche's book Feuchtgebiete (English: Wetlands) was the world's best-selling novel at Amazon.com in March 2008.^[4] Partly autobiographical, it explores cleanliness, sex and femininity, and had sold over 1,500,000 copies in Germany by early 2009.^[5] For supporters it is an erotic literary classic; for critics it is cleverly marketed pornography.^[1]

Justin E. H. Smith wrote of the novel in a review in n+1: "If Roche has hit on something true and heretofore unsaid, it is the insight that to write about bodily fluids is not to describe something exceptional in the course of human life. It is, rather, to describe something that is always there and always felt to be there, through all those other things people do and experience at that level that used to be the subject of novels (falling in love, challenging others to duels, talking about the buying and selling of land, etc)."^[6]

Her second novel, Schoßgebete was published in 2011. The novel makes reference to a family tragedy in Roche's own life, the death of three of her brothers in 2001.^[7]

Singer

In 2006 Roche featured on the single "1. 2. 3. ..." with German musician Bela B., from Bela's debut album Bingo.

See also

• Sex-positive feminism

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Publishers battle to sign up Europe's sex sensation", Jason Burke, The Observer, 25 May 2008
2. ^ "Roche offeriert Wulff Sex für Atom-Veto", Der Spiegel (14 November 2010) (German)
3. ^ "Activist offers sex to German president for 'nuclear veto', The Indian Express (15 November 2010)
4. ^ "Fiction in German makes it to pole position", The Economist, 3 April 2008
5. ^ Caesar, Ed. "Charlotte Roche is an unlikely shock artist", The Times, 1 February 2009. Retrieved 21 March 2009.
6. ^ "Sea Slugs" by Justin E. H. Smith, n+1 (16 March 2009)
7. ^ Pidd, Helen "Charlotte Roche revisits mix of sex and controversy in new novel, Schossgebete", The Guardian, August 16, 2011, accessed August 19, 2011.

External links

• Official website
• Oltermann, Philip (10 May 2008). "Interview: Charlotte Roche". Granta. http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Interview-Charlotte-Roche. Retrieved 10 April 2009. 
• Charlotte Roche at the Internet Movie Database

Persondata
Name	Roche, Charlotte
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	18 March 1978
Place of birth	High Wycombe, England
Date of death
Place of death