From working women, parachute mothers, and middle-class feminists – Marlen Hobrack radically redefines the class question from a female perspective.

The laundry baskets were always full – not with clothes, but with unpaid bills that her mother could not pay on time despite hard work. When Marlen Hobrack reflects on her childhood in poverty in a low-education household, she repeatedly realizes how little her upbringing has in common with the narratives of the middle class, to which she belongs as a successful journalist. But does she really belong as someone who straddles the classes? As a single mother from East Germany who became a mom at 19? Concise and enlightening, "Klassenbeste" debunks middle-class myths of equal opportunity and social mobility – and shows that every identity-political debate is fundamentally a class question.