This conversation volume offers insight into the experiences and thoughts of Hélène Cixous, one of the most important French-speaking authors of our time. "What I do when I write is essentially to write the most intimate, hidden, and forbidden things, where it connects and communicates with world history. That is my constant concern." (Hélène Cixous). In four conversations, which are published here for the first time, Peter Engelmann explores the significant themes in Hélène Cixous' works. Central to this is the author's childhood, which she spent during World War II in Algeria, where her grandmother, who fled from Osnabrück to Oran to escape National Socialism, keeps Osnabrück alive for her as a city of imagination. Cixous also shares this Algerian childhood with Jacques Derrida.