Languages

Listen to It's Cold and It's Getting So Dark, produced by Play for Voices. (Musical sounds are heard. As if someone were practicing the trumpet. Then a long pause. And the narration begins.) SPEAKER 1: She wore a gentleman’s hat and with a trumpet in her hand directed a music that was audible only to her. At last you arrived on time. For once in my lifetime. Then she resumed singing, listening attentively to her inner music. She sang without words, syllables whose...

is it obvious when b’s gaze lingers on people in the schoolyard? there goes leif, being watched. how does it look to someone else? crazy? cheesy? b has known leif since twelfth grade, meaning they were separated from the others and sent to this school where they have a hundred and twenty classmates. then it’s down to pure chance whether old friendships slacken, stay firm, or fall apart at the seams. a high price to pay for a couple of “free” subject choices, limited...

is there a zone of darkness between all languages, a black river, that swallows words and stories and transforms them? here sentences must disrobe, begin to roam, learn to swim, not lose the memory that nests in their bodies, a secret nucleus. will the columbine’s blue be a shade of violet when it reaches the other side, and the red bee balm become a pear, cinnamon- sweet? will my tench be missing a fin in the light of the new language? will it have to learn to crawl or to walk...

(Common room in a senior citizen home. Two elderly men in wheelchairs. The first is watching the one o’clock news, the second is devouring an apple pastry.) FIRST MAN: The nerve. Everyone cheers for him on the Heldenplatz and then he goes and cuts deals with the Russians. SECOND MAN: Yes, that was a mistake. But, come now, it was so long ago, at some point there’s got to be an end— FIRST MAN: That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about...

The first thing I saw when jolted from sleep was my father throwing books out of the window. He was dressed in the clothes he always wore at home, a sleeveless white undershirt and meticulously pressed dark blue trousers that matched the suit jacket he carelessly draped on a hook in the wardrobe as soon as the front door shut behind him. I’d woken with a start, it was night. In the harsh light, Father was standing at the window. He took one book after another from a pile and checked...

Is it me? Am I next? No, you’re not next, no. No? I’m not? No, you’re not. No matter how many times you ask. You? And you? What about me? If you’re next? No? I’m not and you’re not. Neither of us is next. Whether you like it or not. Good. I thought so. No? What was it you thought, take your time, tell me what it was you thought, we’ve surely got long enough for that. That I was next, I thought. Or you. One of us. Me first and then you. I...

perhaps i was just drinking coffee or opening the newspaper. perhaps i was drawing the curtains or looking out onto the street when speech left me. still, i thought, what a rattling from deep in the wall, what a clattering in this room. no windowpanes shattered, no chairs toppled in the kitchen. the names on street signs vanished leaving only the ashes of letters. a tanker filled with words retreated above the houses, massive, silent, my swollen tongue twitched in my dry mouth. i escaped...

TGV 6175 from Paris Gare-de-Lyon Now Lo sits in a Train à Grande Vitesse to the sea. Le TGV: the train of great speed. The TGV has an odd nose similar to the Concorde before it. Lo thinks it might have to do with De Gaulle, who surely had a weakness for prominent noses. Although the train’s furnishings have seen better days, she doesn’t trust herself to tuck in her knees as usual and put her feet against the back of the seat in front of her. Nor to take off her...

I was clouds transforming, a sinking billow. I wanted to stretch out; I threaded and spun myself across the ground floor to the tracks. In times of haphazard, interrupted sleep, I had always used the train station as my sleeping pill. The new ice-white high-speed train stood before the waiting passengers with its windows closed, a foreign being. No one knows what goes on inside its smooth skin. These creatures are called Schlingerlings in common parlance, after the nameless white snakes...

blue The way I spend all morning just thinking: blue! No way is this here blue. You must have been crazy or had some kind of color disability or been a total joker to call this green blue, to insist for years, stubborn as a mule and absolutely serious, that there was an ocean-blue sofa in this room. The way I sit here and shake my head and think: it’s crazy, it’s incredible, crazy blue! The way I sit here and think: all that’s left over, all it is is this totally green...

Leyla’s 10-by-6-foot cell looked like the setting of a bad film noir. A hard cot. A tiny barred window. The air was stuffy and the days dragged by unapologetically. Leyla spent most face down, hands cuffed behind her back. She felt disgusted with her body. It had been a week since her last shower. Her dress was caked with multiple layers of blood and sweat. She had been arrested for illegal racing in Baku’s city center. The official charge might have been...

August 27, 2014 Lucky Punch My second novel Deutscher Meister is about how the professional boxer Heinrich Trollmann beat the Nazis; it was published by Hoffmann und Campe in 2014. As I was writing the last chapter, researching liver punches, those ending in K.O. and those not, and how differently and yet specifically to the liver punch the recipients fall, and what kind of pain they feel, and how liver punches take effect on the inside, in anatomical terms, I worked out where a...

1 After half a life: selva oscura. The dog that I was. Jesus-mittens nailed onto treetips—the Lord had large hands. Blooms made of ejaculate. I walked on. Deeper into the woods.   2 King of the beasts: a bird walking with a broken nose; wings, a comet tail, never worn. Pride after the fall. Carnal desire: a puffy octopus from the class of unsuitable cephalopods, floating in the sky in place of a moon. Staring at the transwoman I cannot be. Call me Beatrice, she says. I...

May 6, 1946, thirty miles east of Dayton, Ohio, at an altitude of six thousand feet, in an old C-54 transport plane. John Conkey, six feet four inches and still completely pale after the fudged takeoff, unbuckles himself and wriggles forward through the gutted interior of the aircraft to Ray Melanchthon Petersime, who is sitting in one of the two remaining rows of seats and watching as a backwater called South Solon emerges beneath him, a heap of houses dumped between sodden fields by the...

The barrel of a gun is trained on my head. I stare at the wall, the unplastered bricks that have to be scenery so that this doesn’t stop being a game. Faruq is lying behind me. I want to turn my head, expecting the shot, blanks, a bang as my eardrum ruptures. The soldiers yelling, the supervisor’s voice, and I feel like I can hear Faruq gasping. Don’t move!—it’s my own breathing. The moment we were supposed to prepare for. The instant when the situation starts...

Maidenhands I walk past an establishment: Barbecue, Drinks, Girls. A modest sign stands out on the right— Contact Bar—and above the red lights smiles a blonde woman with heavily plucked eyebrows. She’s not actually the advertising face of the Contact Bar—she’s holding a pat of butter in her hands, just above her breasts, which are spilling out of her bodice, and smiling on behalf of a supermarket. An ad for a budget market and plucked breasts. Butter ads and...

He doesn’t say that he had no choice. He says that his father was also a soldier. He says that if he had the choice today, he would perhaps choose differently. At that time he made his choice. My two grandfathers were also soldiers and fought for the lunatic who had his grandparents gassed in a concentration camp. But he has never asked about my grandfathers. He was stationed for five years in the occupied territories. Voluntarily. During the First Intifada. He tells this to...

“muxmäuschen” © Simone Kornappel. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Jake Schneider. All rights reserved.

In the 1950s, the behavioral scientist Desmond Morris carried out art experiments with the chimpanzee Congo. What began with a hesitant pencil line drawn by Congo soon led to expressive, powerful, abstract compositions. Julian Huxley and Pablo Picasso were among those who bought the work. Congo painted with a passion but he wasn’t interested in "impact." He felt no need to display his pictures. In fact, he liked to tear them up as soon as they were finished. Morris had to go to some...

Christmas was a weary old man when he entered the city. Puffy-eyed and heavy-legged, he dragged himself along, from street to street, from flat to flat. Our door must have been the last one on a long list, because when he finally got here, I slept through the presents and was comatose long before the oohing and aahing had faded away. There was nothing worth staying up for. I didn’t care about any of our relatives and because Dad wasn’t living here any more, half of them stayed...

Fifty years ago, when Turkish guest workers came to Germany and telephone calls were expensive, people recorded audio tapes and gave them to friends and acquaintances traveling to Turkey. On these tapes the guest workers talked about their lives, their jobs, and the factories they worked in; they described the cities they'd wound up in, and following all these narratives were lists of people they wanted to say hello to. In return, the relatives back home also recorded tapes, sometimes...

I wake up early on an August morning in 1980. The blinds are drawn and the rays of the sun are blinding me. I reach for my sunglasses on the desk, but there is no desk, and the giant map of the United States hanging over the bed is missing too, along with my books, my wardrobe, the pictures, the carpet, and the wallpaper with its distinctive geometric pattern. For a few minutes I lie in bed, confused. I dreamed I was in America. America, my father said, is a melting pot, where everyone is...

In front of a tropical fruit stand in the Piazza dei Cinquecento, lit up by low-hanging bare bulbs, I stood and observed the red flesh pierced by black seeds of the melons, the yellow pineapples split in two, the ovular, yellow-green bunches of grapes, and the segmented coconut flesh laid out in large basins. I heard Arabian music, camels knelt down before a Corpus Christi altar covered over with flowers, blessed mendicants meandered through the streets among the dead cobras, playing...

Karl Walter Block was the only son of Irmgard Block (née Mucek) and Heinrich Maria Block. Heinrich had been a captain during the war and worked in an important secret office in Berlin until, for reasons no one ever discovered, he was dishonorably discharged, on Hitler’s own orders, and sent back to Upper Austria, where there was nothing left for him but to toil away from morning till night for the rest of his life on the farm he had inherited from his parents. This fate...

After the water, there was nothing. And if you looked long enough at the horizon, you could make out a stillness that transformed when the waves crashed against the rig's legs and the rusted steel platform began to sway. The drill ate through layers of limestone into the earth's interior, it probed deep beneath the seabed while the reel on the drill floor rotated ceaselessly, and we, in twelve-hour shifts, stood by at the ready to connect more tubing to the well. The Gulf of...

“What a feeling,” she says. “It’s like everything’s new, it’s really funny.” She means being out again, I think. On her own two feet, so to speak. A bright morning just before the summer, a time for T-shirts, tops and skirts. The road’s empty this early, me watching Susan without looking at her. I drive too fast, for the first time since I took her to the hospital, weeks ago when you couldn’t quite trust the spring. Fifty miles an...

Dr. Heidegger, the adjunct lecturer, lived in a rented room on a back courtyard off the Friedrichstrasse, above a brothel, and one can say that he kept an open house. At the age of seventeen, with a high-school diploma in his pocket, Heidegger had fled the parental spinning mill in a valley in the Swabian Alps with only two goals in mind: to exchange that provincial fustiness for the big city, and to learn languages. First, however, he had to get himself exempted from military service...

Rafik Schami was born in Damascus in 1946, came to Germany in 1971, and studied chemistry in Heidelberg. Today he is the most successful German-speaking Arabic writer. His novels have been translated into twenty-three languages and received numerous international awards. His bestselling books include The Dark Side of Love, The Calligrapher's Secret, and Damascus Nights. Syrian journalist Nadia Midani spoke with Rafik Schami earlier this year. The following is an edited transcript of...

For a poet we loved very much When the paths of the two will intersect at noon, the observer from his high lookout will see a cross drawn on the ground. He will wait for a long time until one of the two will turn up for confession. The two will be in a hurry, having to take care of things that are important to them but irrelevant to the world. And he will wait with the patience of someone bored. The shining white of the snow will disappear, as will the rain’s...

Walter had no luck with women. He had tried to write monologues and essays on this subject, and had even pulled off a noteworthy sentence here and there, but on the whole he came up with only commonplaces, of which he later felt ashamed. It occurred to him that he basically did not understand women, that they fascinated and irritated him, and even though he had now and then been lucky enough to be with one, he could not shake the feeling of expecting too much of them. At first things had...

The four of them dragged the pig on the short ladder and lifted it onto the trestles in front of the sty. Their teeth clenched, the three men watched the woman, Diana Kampradt, the butcher.  “The stove door,” she instructed Sabine in the washhouse, “leave it ajar, so that there’s a draft, small pieces of wood, really get the steam going and keep on adding water, so that it doesn’t boil.” Outside, the butcher poured a bucket of cold water over...

Carola Johansson’s invitation to spend a weekend in her villa in Andalusia arrived on April 7. I smiled wearily because it could only have been a bad joke on the part of one of my friends. Just days before, we had been speaking in the pub about Carola Johansson; new photos, taken by cleverly disguised paparazzi, had appeared in the papers. My friends had brought me the photos because they knew of my weakness for Carola Johansson, and now they had forged, as I believed, this...

Wednesday At about three Farwick leaves the office building at one end of the market place. Just outside the door he stops. Is it warm or isn’t it? He’s carrying his light summer coat over his arm. Middle of May, which means one never knows quite what to do. Sometimes he finds it hard to make simple decisions. The office building has only been completed recently. It caused quite a stir. Sixty years after the end of the war a break with historical building styles;...

Of Wonder's songs the saddest about the downfall of New York City played on a record player in Hester Street of Brecht's poems the most beautiful written in the Charité 2 days before his death about the song of the blackbirds after his death of Shakespeare's plays the strangest about the prince behind the screen of his madness enslaved by rationalism and a tedious ghost of the nights the brightest in front of the KaDeWe the newspaperladies go their ways the...

Endless, the levee. Endless, the dead straight path. Endless, the whirring of the bicycle tires on the asphalt, the whistling of the wind in their ears and the high, bare, immutable blue of the sky over their heads. Endless, the blazing hole of the sun, the shimmer of the heat over the fields and the cruelty of midsummer in the afternoon, when the greasy coating of sweat, dust, and sunscreen begins to drip from their faces onto the handlebars, and each revolution of the pedals climbs with...

On virtual seas I surf recklessly in every shape that I invent for myself omnipotent God among Gods mercifully I submerge a vulnerable fate create the world i seven seconds disappear into whoever’s story that only the mouse knows I erase death with one key and save beauty youth immortality For a while I don’t crash into life  

On the bottom of the seas                                                                         the gods are...

Daytimes my Daddy carries mail while I’m sitting here in school     Evenings     shopkeeper     he     and his salesman     I sells fresh produce Mama and kerosene I at the biggest circle where lovely women up on giant billboards     when nighttimes     the lamps flicker     and it’s fragrant     children work at...

I hate men. Anna says good men do exist. Nice, friendly men who cook and help clean up and who earn money. Men who want to have children and give gifts and book vacations. Who wear clean clothes, don’t drink, and even look halfway decent. Where on earth are they, I ask. She says they’re out there—if not in our town then in Frankfurt. But she doesn’t know any personally, unless you count people she’s seen on TV. That’s why I always repeat the words...

I walk toward the mill To meet my quiet father He walks on grass-covered paths His foot in a child's shoe The mill got swept away by the river Two wars have since gone by Father was taken away later on Soon no one knows that either.

Wherever to go and whatever from can always be said for certain: because it's Sunday and three cars in front of the house hour after hour Marx Engels Lenin Stalin in the back seat ad usum delphini They've come straight from Utopia Headquarters in Berlin-Lichtenberg smoking and reading the paper and waiting for objections coming from my poor and hesitant words newly hatched migrants trailblazers heading to a place where "talk of trees" does not involve silence...

Where did they all go this time? Last Friday, that's right, Friday afternoon, it suddenly got quiet like this. There's always some kind of noise around here—footsteps, somebody coughing out in the hall—but when there's absolutely nothing going on, like now, you can feel it pressing down on your skull like a dead weight, and it's like you've got butterflies in your stomach, anyways, I went over to Comrade Tolkening's office but there wasn't a soul...

To awaken with her, this dream to begin days, days full and ripe whose mornings already pour gold just like this one, this, on which I dream, and say to the gold in my window, I finally understand you, when she lies by me when I hold her, her breath when my hands are once more sure of what they must curve to hold, to hold her form in the mornings, early, when the days bear her soft name, this gold reaches its goal. I'd like to dream, dream for years, study the alchemy of...

Hi. My name is Hasan Kazan. In Berlin some people call me Hansi though my parents gave me the name Hasan Selim Khan. Oh yeah, my parents . . . They left Istanbul years ago and moved to West Berlin, the Kreuzberg district. That's where I was born. My parents believed in the West. To them, it meant progress, technology, and jobs. But as my brother Ediz and I grew up and actually started to come into contact with Western values, morals, and schools, my parents changed their minds....

Feridun Zaimoğlu's Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1998) presents the fictionalized voices of twenty-six women of Turkish heritage living in Germany. "Koppstoff," which when translated literally means "head material," refers not only to the headscarf worn on the heads of many Muslim women, but also to what is going on in their heads—their thoughts, perspectives and inner lives. ındeed, the book seems to offer readers information "straight from the...

The new boy with the big ears stood in the cold neon light of the cloakroom, right in the middle of the room, and his school slippers seemed to be stuck to the green linoleum. Take off your pants, Aunt Edeltraut said, and the new boy pressed his hands against the seams of his cords. All the children take off their pants here, said Aunt Edeltraut. Her voice still sounded friendly, but it had that slight quaver that signaled danger. The boy wasn't familiar with the danger, it was his...

My father was horrified when I told him that I was getting married and that the date and place were already set. He shook his head with his typical facial expression, a mixture of repugnance, incomprehension and resignation. As long as he made this face at me all the time, I knew that he still couldn't see me as an adult. It wasn't the fact that I was getting married that so upset him. Nor did he have anything against the woman I wanted to marry. What bothered him was the...

My bag in the back of the truck, the Antarctica bottles open, and we're off. David at the wheel of the red pickup, Felix in an open shirt and panama hat, me with the twenty-four-hour flight in my bones. We blast through a red light. Between the entrance ramps and concrete pillars the greenery grows rampant, and above everything an airplane thunders in for a landing. Felix reaches for the glove compartment and tears the door off, Holy Mother of God, there's nothing there, did you...

Three Times Germany is an audio production of twenty-three monologues performed by eight actors. The monologues are based on interviews of East Germans, West Germans, and Germans living in New York. Retracing his own life journey from East Germany to West Germany in 1974 and on to New York in 1980, Uwe Mengel interviewed Germans who crossed his path along the way. The resulting monologues offer an unusual and often disconcerting view into the prejudices and reservations with which Germans...

Everything I have I carry with me. Or: everything that's mine I carry on me. I carried everything I had. It wasn't actually mine. It was either intended for a different purpose or somebody else's. The pigskin suitcase was a gramophone box. The jacket was from my father. The town coat with the velvet neckband from my grandfather. The breeches from my Uncle Edwin. The leather puttees from our neighbor, Herr Carp. The green gloves from my Auntie Fini. Only the claret silk...

Evil wears no gloves. You turned red with shame when the slice of cake tipped over onto the tablecloth. Because you've known for a long time what is appropriate in a German cafe. The waiter hissed: "The broom's included in the price." You understood this command, said nothing, and cleared the food from the table, vigorously, quickly. You were somehow or other on duty, suddenly. Your fingers trembled, and I was thinking of "tea parties" and "grills." Stains on a German...

Pentecost, the peaceful holiday, had come, and Salzburg was something akin to a city under a state of emergency. By Friday, even schoolgirls from good homes did not make it all the way to school, if they were found to be out and about in the wrong kind of clothes; and heedless apprentices, their hairdos looking like something from a "wanted" poster, were collared in the street and shipped straight off home. Whoever was suspected of being under thirty years of age had little chance of...

It's been almost three years since I ended up on that street in the Grenelle quarter. Chance led me there—or rather, not so much chance as intoxication. The intoxication of the streets that always seizes me in Paris. At the time I encountered the street, I was spending four weeks completely alone in Paris and would walk for several hours each day through the quarters. It was an obsession that I couldn't resist. Its power is best attested by the fact that I felt it to be a...

The curtain goes up on the reading world from A to Zoo, emblematic. Here come the animals, tame and wild: Already it's problematic. * Apes smile at what they see When standing before mirrors. People smile or laugh, may be, looking on their lives in letters. * Is reading hard, or is it fun? Is it grasshopper or ant? Well, if you must know, son, Grab your specs and pipe a chant! * From blackbird to starling, the birds have gone their way. Ice and...

"Impossible" must be eliminated from our vocabularies! —Napoleon Bonaparte Professor Pizier lives in a trailer. In order to be prepared, as he says. He's set for his getaway. His bags are packed. He has ten canisters of gasoline and if need be, could escape to North Africa via Malaga and Algeciras without stopping at a pump. If "they" come, they won't catch him. They caught him forty times. They locked him up in a camp forty times—but he always managed to slip out....

"Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe." Why "must"? Writing from Paris in August 1948 to relatives in the new state of Israel, Paul Celan, having barely survived the "Final Solution" expedited by Nazism, explains that a poet cannot stop writing, "even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German." This fateful pledge, from a brutally orphaned son whose stirring 1945 ballad, "Deathfugue," intones "Death is a...

Migrant, immigrant, intercultural or multicultural literature today (in Germany and elsewhere) is considered a category of literature by authors who write from a perspective refracted by at least two cultures, national identities, or languages. An "immigrant background" has become a symptom of today's world, a world suffering from ADHD and a persistent pattern of hyperactivity, as well as from impulsiveness and anger. Wars, social erosion, and even environmental issues are creating a...

Dreams Minetti One morning Maag wakes up with the idea to develop a search engine with which one finds what does not yet exist, dreams Minetti. Thinks Maag Minetti would say the problem was solely the optimizing of proximity and distance, thinks Maag. Clouds Minetti observes the drifting clouds during his stroll. Every now and then he pauses. Curious, he traces with the tip of his walking stick the contours of cloudbirds of every genus and species, small cloudephants, flying...

At eleven, it was decided that she would become a dancer. With her peculiar disposition and a flair for grimacing and contorting her limbs, she seemed well suited to this profession. Previously careless in her every step, she now learned how to master her elastic ligaments, her too-flat joints. She infiltrated—cautiously and patiently, again and again—her toes, her ankles, her knees; rapaciously descended upon her narrow shoulders and the curve in her slender arms;...

In April 1935, the Paris Central of the Communist Party found itself in an acutely embarrassing dilemma. Moscow had asked them to bring one representative from each ethnic group oppressed by French imperialism to the Festival of Peace scheduled for that coming summer. But although when they went through the membership rolls it was no trouble at all to find a trustworthy Algerian and an active Vietnamese, likewise Polynesians and Caribbean mulattoes who enthusiastically embraced the...

The promise a dam must keep, what the most beautiful language in the world sounds like, and how often a heart must beat to beat shame Francesco rented a room from old Mirela and moved in opposite, and old Mirela unpacked her dusty make-up, saw that the powder was crumbly and the lipstick no use any more, bought herself new make-up that very same day, and fiddled around with the tomatoes in her garden, her cheeks all rosy. You had a good view into Francesco's room from the garden. On...

In this short story, Johann Sebastian Bach frames Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for theft on an airplane.   On a flight to Budapest I was sitting next to a very young girl who immediately won me over with her green eyes and blonde pigtails. Her mother was also blonde and green-eyed and sunk in Brigitte, a sort of German cross between Martha Stewart Living and Cosmopolitan. I forgave her because her daughter was such a pretty child, in a serious, obedient way, a miniature mixture of...

She was on her way up the stairs. Where the steps got wider in the corner of the stairwell, on the side toward the wall, she halted for a moment and waited till she caught her breath. Her knees were trembling a bit, and she thought: That's the shock. It's found its way to my limbs. Still there. She climbed further and held on to the railing with her left hand. Most of the brass borders along the edges of the steps had been torn off, and the linoleum was tattered and covered in gray...

It was always the same. The express trains were drafty. They kept them too cold, and no matter how warm the jacket, it didn't help. Mareike knew this stretch, she could recite the stations in order. Yet once again she had forgotten to pack a scarf, an undershirt, thick socks. The landscape, arid and unremarkable, flew by, the weather report had forecast 86 degrees. And she was sitting here freezing. It was her boss's fault. It was the new branch office in the north's fault....

One. Two. And three. During the first three years of school, we are required to cross our arms if we wish to rest them on our desktops when we aren't writing. Only when we are older, the teachers say, will we be permitted to lay one arm smooth and straight atop the other. When we pray, each hand rests flat against the other, no interlocking of fingers allowed. When it's time for recess, we exit the classroom one behind the other in single file, nice and slow, the teachers say....

Later it wasn't easy for Michael to believe that they had really been capable of it. It must have been because it was Christmas Eve, one of the last of the century, because of the solemn air of withdrawal around them, which made the streets appear abandoned. The holiday isolated the four friends, who had been thrown together, more than any ordinary day. The evening was not excessively cold. There was a thin covering of snow on the streets. The overcast sky was pale gray and hung low...

He'd loused it up, that was for sure! As head of security he'd been in charge of the deal. The fact that the Russians' lead containers held not plutonium but a scribbled note saying, "Kiss my ass! You Nazi Hitlers are all as dumb as shit!" along with two chopped-off pig's balls was neither here nor there. After all, his own men's cases had contained toilet paper instead of cash. The entire deal had been a joke, although a joke with a deadly punchline for two of the...

Out of the hundred thousand or more stories that happen in Berlin on a daily basis, why tell this one? Let's say it's indicative of a general trend. The story's main character is Anita Paschke-thirty-two years old, blond, slim, single, and a mother of three. Minor characters making an appearance are Ströhler, a waiter, Schälicke, a second lieutenant with the East German People's Police, and Siegfried Böttger, the director of a state-owned enterprise,...

My teacher was standing at the entrance to the schoolyard, watching me as I walked away. Now finally I can hide the front part of me from him, and I unbutton my white smock collar, holding the ends together so it won't fall off. I am sure blood will soon be gushing from my nose. The candy-store man has gone back into his cave-like shop. Caramel candy sticks wrapped in a cloth napkin lie piled like pieces of wood in the shop window. I'd love to stop and look at them for a long...

"Read that," said Studer, thrusting a telegram under his friend Madelin's nose. It was dark outside the Palais de Justice, the Seine gurgled as it lapped against the quai and the nearest street-lamp was a few yards away. "Greetings from young Jakobli to old Jakob Hedy." The commissaire read out the words haltingly once he was under the flickering gaslight. Although Madelin had been attached to the Sûreté in Strasbourg some years before, and therefore was not entirely...

The villages here are small and scattered. The houses are low, and trees hardly reach the height of the roofs before they begin to grow crooked. Once a young girl lived in a low-built, brown wooden house at the edge of the village. Her house looked more like a shed, since it consisted of only one narrow room. The door was usually open for everyone to look in. There one was her bed, with some brightly colored blankets spread over it. She often lay on the bed with the door open. One saw her...

This World An Invocation to God - I He asked me to meet him at the Kreuzberger Café, promising to tell me a story I could use while still staying within the confines of propriety. His call came at an inconvenient time; it was my day off and I wanted to just sit at home and watch videos. But he refused to be put off. His cousin - that much he was ready to tell me - was "infatuated" with a decent young man, but as a devout Muslim she couldn't have a normal romantic...

Characters: Siggi Grünebaum, an old diamond cutter Benny Schorsch, his partner Violetta Grünebaum-Moser, Siggi's daughter Roland Moser, her husband Elfie Schneider, a young woman The play takes place in the Diamond District of New York City, in the last year of the last century. Act 1 Lunchtime with Wagner New York City, 47th Street. It's a winter afternoon in the Diamond District. Siggi Grünebaum's small diamond store sits to the right of a passageway...

Esteemed Gentlemen of the Academy! I feel honored by your invitation to present the academy with a report on my former life as an ape. I am afraid, however, that I will be unable to comply with your request. It is now some five years that I have been separated from apedom-a short time according to the calendar, perhaps, but an eternity when you have to gallop through it the way I did. And even though I was accompanied, at least for parts of the way, by fine human beings, good counsel,...

Monologue for the Stage A Tragicomedy * Dedicated to a great poet, who understands that despite Sarajevo, life offers something more than death. * Darkness. In the distance the sound of airplanes is heard in ever increasing volume. The scream of sirens, shortly thereafter the sound of bombs pummeling the ground. Noise, terrible noise. Suddenly silence. Children's voices from off-stage. Girl: I'm scared. Boy: Scaredy-cat. It's already over. You don't...

Of course it had to be salsa, which Broschkus detested. In a perfunctory way, he set his legs in motion, more the representation of a dance than the dance itself, he wanted to focus on the silvery toenails before him, on the brown feet in their cheap sandals, on the ankles, sinews, calf muscles; but the girl, swaying in wondrously soft motions, made him a gift of her long black tresses that snapped back and forth in syncopation with her every move, and when Broschkus dared to raise his...

The building stood at Frankfurt's western edge, near a river, the Nidda. The old man had never expected to inherit it, he'd been shocked when the news came to him. At first he'd found himself unable to remember its former owner. The building had a façade typical of the post-war years, soiled and inexpressive. Probably it hadn't seen a coat of paint since the late 50s. The exterior was plastered in a pattern of rough, worm-shaped indentations in which decades'...

I my umbrella both of us gray with a fine wooden grip from hand to hand we go I and my trusty umbrella he's always at hand even when it's not raining but when the sun comes out I let him down

when there were no secret parts writing was devised on a woman's body no part left undescribed men and their dirty fingers mixed up one character with the other until the letters couldn't be read they had never gotten around to reading they became doubters of script looking for the lost language burned all books short of their own body out of the ashes fashioned their dream dame veiled it deep black are illiterates still

"Herr Rudolf! Wait a minute." The caretaker's old wife straightened up, dropped her rag into her bucket, and limped over to the stairs. Herr Rudolf stopped and removed his tasseled hat. The snow on his shoes was melting. As a man with both a social conscience and a vague and confused attitude to professional cleaning ladies, the puddle forming around his feet made him feel very ill at ease. "Good day, Frau Simmes." Herr Rudolf tried to smile. "Good day." The caretaker's wife...

After months of controversy, the new hair tax was approved. The Hamster Lovers' Guild was said to be the driving force behind the reform. The Guild had always found it objectionable that the tax levied on mammals was the same for a hamster as for a German shepherd. They proposed that the tax be recalculated in accordance with an animal's surface area. The tax agency accepted this compromise, but then chose to avoid the term "surface area," which might have been construed as...

In 1999 and 2000 Birgit Biehl journeyed alone through Africa's Sahel from Senegal to the Sudan, and then through Yemen, Oman, and a half dozen other Middle Eastern countries. During the fourteen months of her trip, the then-fifty-five-year-old author hiked more than 700 miles, rode in overloaded ferries, dilapidated automobiles, minibuses, and old pickup trucks piled high with freight and people. After the trip she published Splitter im Sand, Lektionen am Wege (Athena Verlag 2001)....

Translator's Note: Campo Santo, from which this chapter is taken, is a collection of prose pieces and essays never before published in book form, though most have appeared in journals. "Campo Santo" itself was found among Max Sebald's papers after his death by his German publisher Michael Krüger, who gave a reading of it at a W.G. Sebald Memorial Day in London on 31 January 2003. It is one of the four essays on Corsica—one very short, three longer—that open the...

Laura and Alexander met at the billiards bar where Laura is a waitress. Laura spots Alexander the minute he walks in, she still believes in love at first sight. Alexander doesn't say a word to anyone, takes a seat at the bar, orders a beer and stares into his glass. A moody one, sniggers the girl who washes the glasses, but Laura snaps that she should keep her mouth shut. Later, when not much else is happening, she goes over and stands next to Alexander and rubs the tip of her finger...

1 "What are you doing over there?" asked the dog. "Collecting feathers," said Lotta. She turned around. "And what are you doing?" The dog squinted in the sun. It was early in the morning. The sun's rays were slanted and did not give off much warmth. The dog was small and black and thin and very dirty. "I asked you what you were doing," said Lotta. The dog sat down in the grass and began to lick his front right paw. He wrinkled up his nose and cleaned especially carefully...

Everybody was gone, and Viktoria was home all alone. "When everybody's gone, my house is a magic place." She went to her parents' bedroom and pulled back the bedspread. A big bear lay in the middle of the bed. He looked right at her. "Aha!" Viktoria said. "Give me something," she said. The bear walked out of the room and brought her dad's hat to her. Viktoria put it on. Then she covered up the bear again. She opened her mom's nightstand. And there sat a big...

After the afternoon in N., something changed. I became cold-blooded and more demanding at the same time; Michael was surprised at me and sometimes didn't know what to do. He hadn't realized, he said one evening, what a wild temperament was hidden inside me, what a volcano. I made wild little celebrations out of our meetings; I waited for him naked in a hotel room; I bought champagne, appeared in a semitransparent robe or wore nothing under my coat as I waited for him at Reception;...

Everybody knows you can't choose your place of birth, any more than you can select your parents. My birthplace is located on a body of water; human hands have altered and straightened the banks so many times that these waters are no longer referred to as a river, but rather a canal. This canal empties into the Tisza, and the Tisza flows into the Danube. My memories of the Danube begin in the summer of 1941. My parents, who had been so inept as to be Jews, were already under arrest...

Crossing the Serbian Republic's Border Most of the Republika Srpska border is made of garbage—it seems the whole town of Stolac brings its trash here. I meet three oncoming cars in fifty kilometers. The village of Malineja is marked on the German Automobile Club map, but the reality is that it's completely wiped out. Nature is a little too unspoiled for me, and so I turn up the music in the car full blast to remind me that there's a Somewhere Else. Lisbon, for instance,...

Set in the border triangle of Iran, Irak, and Turkey, Im Grenzland [At the Borderline] is the story of an Iraqi Kurd who makes his living as a smuggler. Having bought a map of landmines from a former soldier, the smuggler negotiates a path through the war-torn border region to bring items that have become luxuries (due to embargo) back into his country. On each trip he unearths land mines on his way out of the country and buries them on his way back. He reads the empty landscape like a...

"What a slimeball!" She pressed the glass against her cheek again. "And you go along with him. All this time you've been so stubborn. Then somebody like him comes along and . . . I just don't get it!" Robert spread his fingers. He wasn't sure he would even feel the wart if it didn't rub against his middle finger. At first it had felt like a scab, now it was more like a crumb of toast. "Four weeks at the most," he said, and glanced up briefly. She was still leaning...

For the last week it's been quiet in this side wing of what used to be a fashionable Jewish apartment block in Lehniner Strasse. We're the last two inhabitants, she and I. A wing full of gloomy Berlin rooms, shaped like squares with one corner chopped off, rooms with three outside walls, practically impossible to heat and the toilet's on the half-landing . . . It is highly improbable that this rundown building would simply be forgotten while all the others are gradually being...

In the steppes of southern Russia, there once was a city whose inhabitants spoke only French in the summer and English in the fall.    Our first official German document, which we got at police headquarters on the Alexanderplatz in 1990, was an East German residence permit. We didn't get any closer to our old dream: the right to travel freely. Right on the first page of the document it said: On departure from the German Democratic Republic, this permit must be...