Katja Lange-Müller

This is a first-person retrospective account of a love-story, in the voice of the author's alter ego Soja (in her communist mother's mind, the name of a fallen heroine of the Soviet workers' struggle; to every other German the name of a bean). Settled in the unfashionable West Berlin neighbourhood of Moabit after being allowed to leave the DDR in 1986, Soja falls heavily for a man she's met in the street, Harry. It's only after they've been together for a few weeks that he tells her that he's on parole after serving a long jail sentence, and has been a heroin addict. Soja and her radical lefty friends rally round to support Harry through a mandatory rehabilitation programme, although their enthusiasm for that effort wanes when Harry's case-worker warns them that he is HIV-positive.

It ends as we would expect, of course: Soja sticks by Harry until the end, and doesn't always get much thanks for her efforts. But this isn't a book you read for the storyline; it's all about Soja's wry retrospective digging into her own motivation and reexamining it in the light of Harry's view of things, as written down in a notebook she discovered among his things long after the event. And the background of Berlin around the time of the fall of the Wall. There's a telling scene towards the end of the book where Harry, watching TV in his AIDS hospice, sees Erich Honecker being led off to jail on the TV news and feels sympathy for him: he knows exactly what the renewed prospect of prison feels like when you've already served ten years (as Honecker did under the Nazis).… (mais)

Sometime in the late 1970s, the narrator, a qualified but incompetent and thoroughly demotivated typesetter, gets a job in a small private printing works in East Berlin. It doesn't last long, but she has enough time to observe her three co-workers and realise that all four of them have only been allowed to work in the private sector because life has damaged them so much that they are considered no use to the state any more.

In a tightly-constructed novella that manages to give the impression of having been compiled by someone with a serious hangover even though it doesn't waste a word anywhere, Lange-Müller tells us the story of the other three castaways whilst letting us divine the essentials of the narrator's own situation (which obviously has more than a touch of autobiography about it). And she sets up a slightly backhanded memorial to a trade that has essentially disappeared in our own lifetimes, letting us decide for ourselves if we want to draw any parallels with a state that disappeared from the maps at about the same time as the last typesetter. Wonderful, sad, funny, and grumpy, all at the same time.… (mais)

A collection of entertainingly subversive stories and newspaper columns from the late nineties, dealing with a wide range of topics, from mushrooms (poisonous) and zoo animals (neurotic) to circus freaks and baseball. And with quite a lot about real life in the less-than-chic Berlin neighbourhood of Wedding, so convenient for her favourite all-night bar, the "Feuchte Welle" on the "five-jail-island" of Moabit, where the barman lets homeless day-labourers sleep undisturbed, provided they pay for a beer every two or three hours. Lange-Müller wants to show us that reunified Berlin is not a glamorous city for everyone who lives there, and that it's not always easy to feel grateful for the lifting of the iron curtain when it means you have to do your shopping at Aldi. But this is mostly a book about individual contrariness - mostly on the part of the author, sometimes of the people who tell her their stories over a few beers. Any generalising is left to the reader.

Oh yes, and those ducks. There are two duck stories in the collection, actually: in neither one do the ducks come out of it well.… (mais)

A short, wry, witty book consisting of two separate but parallel novella-length episodes from the life of the unnamed narrator, who is a schoolgirl in "Käfer" and a young woman in "Servus". In both, she lands herself with a disproportionate amount of trouble and humiliation through a small, impulsive act of subversion that seemed like a good idea at the time. In the back-cover blurb, Monika Maron perceptively describes the narrator's gestures as "two failed attempts to begin life": she is trying to assert her individuality as a human being in a world where individuality and the possession of free will are punishable offences. There's nothing overtly political in either story, and in fact you have to read them quite closely even to work out that the setting is East Germany, but it's fairly obvious that one of the things Lange-Müller is trying to make us see is how human values get squashed out when authority can't afford to let itself see the funny side any more. Sadly, we can't claim that that particular problem disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall...

Clever, funny, touching, unexpected and very human - this definitely deserves to be better-known!… (mais)