“Maybe this is how you should live, exactly like this!! Flooring the gas pedal, an unfiltered cigarette perpetually between your lips”
Volker Winterberg works as a community service volunteer in a retirement home and writes poetry in his spare time. He dreams of becoming a poet like Peter Rühmkorf and the writers of Group 47. But, for now, he still has to spend the early mornings preparing his seniors for the day. He spends the rest of the time drinking, smoking and writing in bars, his nights often in strangers’ beds. A short hitchhiking trip to Paris without money inspires him to write his best poems yet – and then he wins a chance to participate in a meeting for emerging writers in West Berlin. In the divided city, he meets Heiner Müller, the young, peculiar poet Thomas and, most importantly, Katja, who joins Volker on excursions to the Wall and writes him love letters after he returns home. When Volker travels to Berlin a second time, he embarks on a turbulent adventure with Katja and a convoluted Odyssey through the old West Berlin.
An atmospherically dense novel about the passion for literature and writing which paints a unique panorama of postwar German literature.
