New Stories from “Herr Lehmann”  The Return of the Literary Chatterbox

In “Frankie and Freddie”, Sven Regener sends familiar characters from the “Herr Lehmann” universe on a journey through the wintry streets of West Berlin in 1980. With his usual laconic wit, he recounts the significance of seemingly trivial events and a trip across the city that turns into an odyssey both absurd and hilarious.

As a writer, the musician Sven Regener (Element of Crime) achieved more with his highly successful debut novel Herr Lehmann (Berlin Blues, 2001) than merely creating a fictional universe that has since expanded across five further novels. He also established a distinctive narrative style entirely his own: laconic, cheeky and rich in dialogue. As early as 2008, Ursula März wrote in Die Zeit that Regener had succeeded in dissolving the boundary between popular fiction and so-called serious literature.

Part of this achievement lies in his introduction of colloquial expressions and everyday turns of phrase into literature that would probably never have found their way there otherwise. One such term is “Laberflash” (roughly, a bout of compulsive rambling). Few authors are as adept at parodying everyday chatter without making their characters look ridiculous. More than that, it is precisely this endless talking, combined with wandering streams of thought, that makes readers grow so fond of them. In this way, a portrait emerges of a vanished world: the romanticised, wild and chaotic left-alternative scene of West Berlin in the 1980s and the early years following German reunification.

An Odyssey Through Snow-Covered West Berlin

Regener’s new novel Frankie and Freddie picks up where Der kleine Bruder (The Little Brother, 2008) left off. With the last of his money in his pocket, Frank Lehmann has travelled to Berlin to visit his older brother Manfred, only to find him absent. He is taken in by his brother’s friends, who live together in a shared flat. Strangely, everyone there calls Manfred “Freddie”, although Frank has always known him simply as “Manni”. Eventually, Frank tracks his brother down to a hotel on Kurfürstendamm, where he has been taking part in a “pill project”, a “sort of psychopharmaceutical experimental thingamajig”. And it shows. In Frankie and Freddie, Frank Lehmann has exactly one task: to collect his brother from that hotel on Kurfürstendamm the day before Christmas Eve. But when his brother’s Opel Kadett refuses to start, Frank faces a problem. His brother is afraid of people, so neither the Underground nor a taxi is an option. Fortunately, their flatmate Karl Schmidt has access to a “Kastenente”, an old Citroën delivery van, thanks to his job as a snow-clearing operator. Thus begins an odyssey through the snow-covered city, providing ample opportunity for “stupid chatter and bizarre insinuations”.

Something Nice, or at Least Something Normal

The plot is secondary; the characters and their thoughts and conversations take centre stage. Yet a storyline does develop when Freddie leaves his bag behind at the hotel, setting in motion a journey across the city that ultimately involves travelling on the Underground after all. Their trip on the legendary U8 line takes them through the ghost stations beneath East Berlin. Almost casually, Regener evokes the division of Germany by allowing us access to Frank’s thoughts: Since the novel is set in the days immediately before Christmas, the season itself becomes a source of all sorts of associations. Frank feels as though he is taking part in a nativity play: he and his brother sitting in the vehicle like Mary and Joseph, while a well-meaning but excessively talkative man at a petrol station peers in “through the window from outside like the ox and the donkey”.

Frankie and Freddie fully lives up to the ambition Regener articulated in an interview with SWR: it is simply great fun to read. Readers will also enjoy encountering familiar faces from the earlier novels once again. It is difficult to say whether the same applies to newcomers to the Lehmann universe, or whether younger readers will connect with it at all. And although Regener stated in the same interview that he felt the Lehmann chapter had now come to an end, it is even harder to say whether he might not still have a few more episodes from the Lehmann cosmos up his sleeve. It would not be entirely surprising.

September 2026