Stories in Simple Language  Voluntary Self-Limitation

With an extremely pared-down use of language, Annette Pehnt undertakes an unusual literary experiment in her new collection of stories. It is absolutely successful: precisely because of these constraints, the existential stories exert a powerful pull.

In 2020, LiES. Das Buch (READ. The Book) was published – a first collection featuring “literature in simple language”. Hauke Hückstädt, director of the Frankfurt Literaturhaus, had persuaded contemporary German-language authors to write short stories using simple means: only short sentences were allowed, each line could contain only a single sentence, and foreign or technical terms were forbidden. In 2023, LiES. Das zweite Buch (READ. The Second Book) appeared, this time with a contribution by Annette Pehnt.

Stripped-Down Language

This experience inspired Pehnt to attempt a further experiment. She wrote the story collection Einen Vulkan besteigen (Climbing a Volcano), which contains 25 “minimal stories”. “I wanted to know what would emerge if I (more radically than usual) left out everything superfluous in my writing. What happens to the language if I slim it down consistently, allowing no filler words, no nested sentences, no digressions, no elaborate metaphors,” Pehnt writes in the afterword.

However, Pehnt's minimalist stories are by no means “simple” in the sense of being overly simplistic. Nor are they “light” in the sense of carefree. In most of her stories, Pehnt plunges directly into the narrator’s stream of thoughts. The characters often speak in inner monologues. The stories usually begin abruptly, sometimes with self-revelations such as: “I wish I had a sister,” or: “Yesterday I was still healthy,” or: “Dad has died, my brother says.” Sometimes, however, they begin with deliberately neutral statements, such as: “I am sitting in front of the house.”  

A Powerful Pull

Annette Pehnt’s stories deal with secret wishes and private thoughts, with childhood, motherhood and family dynamics, with illness and death, and with experiences of exclusion – existential subjects altogether. They exert a tremendous pull on the reader. This is due in part to the staccato-like, breathless style, which is further intensified by the fact that every sentence or clause ends with a line break. Visually, the texts therefore resemble long poems. Pehnt’s collection was, quite rightly, nominated for the Bavarian Book Prize in 2025; for the jury, the author demonstrates “how this supposed limitation can become a great liberation of storytelling – both a joy to read and to learn from!”

In the title story, a woman climbs a volcano. Alone. She does not feel entirely at ease. She is afraid of falling and unsure of herself. As she ascends, she thinks of her father suffering from dementia and of her unpleasant boss at the office. And of the indifference of the world: “No one is here to find me. The volcano doesn’t care.” What happens when she stumbles at the end? We do not know. Many of the texts end openly. Pehnt’s minimal stories are like life itself: they must end, but no one knows when or how.

January 2026