September 15, 2024
Left behind by his East German parents, who flee to the west following the collapse of the GDR, young Carl Bischoff falls in with an unruly crew of utopian anarchists in Berlin--where he finds himself as a poet. In response to his mother Inge's flood of letters, Carl assures her that he's looking after their house in the central state of Thuringia. But he drives his father Walter's beloved Zhiguli to Berlin, where he makes a little money as an unpapered cabbie and lives and works with a group of squatters whose mission is to rebuild a wide stretch of dilapidated and war-damaged buildings for people to live in. The more involved in the communal project and visions of a new future Carl becomes, the more inspired he is as a poet. His poems, he is told, capture "the present moment and its sound at perception's ground zero." Initially separated en route to a transit camp across the border, his parents make do with various jobs on the other side (Walter teaches computer programming). Ultimately, and unpredictably, they find freedom--with Carl--in Los Angeles. There, his accordion in tow, Walter plans on joining a band. A prizewinner and bestseller in Europe, the novel is loosely and sometimes elusively tied to its era, departing reality with corrosive dark visions including Nazis who look like Elvis. As a result, the story doesn't always have the resonance it should. Long sections of the nearly 600-page book rather ploddingly record day-to-day developments. But Seiler's dry wit and command of language, which can itself be musical, keep the pages humming. And when things slow down, there's always an eccentric called the Shepherd and his pet goat, Dodo, for comic relief. A powerfully imagined novel of the new Germany worth sticking with through its dull spots.
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August 19, 2024
The gorgeous latest from Seiler (In Case of Loss) offers an intimate view of a German family’s reckoning with the end of the Cold War. In the autumn of 1989, as East Germany begins to fall apart, 20-something Carl Bischoff is called home from university to the small village where he was raised. With the border about to open, his parents plan to leave for a West German refugee camp. They ask Carl to stay behind—he imagines himself “the rearguard” of their house. Very soon, though, protecting his childhood home is no longer enough, as “somewhere out there, history was raging.” Carl sets off for East Berlin, where he squats in a bomb-scarred building in Prenzlauer Berg and falls in with a group of German and Russian artists and punks led by an enigmatic man who’s called Shepherd because he lives with his goat. Seiler crafts a fascinating intergenerational exploration of German reunification, as Carl comes to see his parents as people with wants and dreams like him, “as if they’d only just begun to exist.” It’s an exceptional story of fresh starts.