Die Kosmonauten
The Cosmonauts
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln 2003, 383 pages
The subject of this novel is the epochal rupture of 1989 and the opportunity that this offered a young person: the emphatic parallel action of world history and personal biography in which an individual life gains freer and broader horizons and significance by joining itself to the openness of contemporary history. The novel begins in old West Germany, in the heart of the Rhine Republic. In Cologne, Georg sits next to an unknown woman in the tram and talks to her; her name is Rosalie. They are enchanted with one another; both want to trade in a stupid old life for a new model; and so they ditch their old partner, quit their jobs and move to the Wild East. They move into a run-down house in the ‘centre’ – but the name itself is not dropped, for central Berlin is still a nameless district that has not yet been inflated into an iconography. ‘Rosalie looks out the window and runs her hand through her hair. She thought: Something is happening in this city. Something is happening to us’. As the fall of the Wall re-invented Berlin, so Georg and Rosalie expect love to re-make their lives.
Richard David Precht – Biography
Ijoma Mangold: „Es passiert etwas mit diesem Haar"
© Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17.03.2003
