Der Wendehals: Eine Unterhaltung
The Wry-Neck
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. 1995, 125 pages
A stranger in his own land, deserted by history and an outcast in the present, the ‘I’ and the ‘he’ of this tale walk blustering about Berlin, more comrades in fate than antipodes in a quarrel. ‘He’, ‘colleague Schaber’, an old party big shot at the Academy of Sciences, has been investigated and processed out by the all-powerful ‘Commission’. After vain efforts to ‘please the enemy’, he crawls under the rock of a ‘financial academy’ and emerges, coat freshly turned, as a ‘salesman of the sell-out’ – without a goal or ideals, but now with a wry neck. The ‘I’ narrator, on the other hand, shamefully betrayed by a ‘bankrupt history’, lives on, morally unimpeachable, as one of the unemployed; innerly liquidated, yet cheerful and content.
Volker Braun – Biography
Reinhard Mohr: „Strassen-Talk-Show der Beleidigten"
© Die Tageszeitung, 15.04.1995
