Of dangerous decisions, forged passports, and fateful friendships: in Mitte, Volker Kutscher brings his readers the increasingly threatening atmosphere of the thirties closer than ever before.
Fritz Thormann, an avid reader and enthusiastic sportsman, is one of those people who have the bad luck of always being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a result, the almost 16-year-old has already found himself in many risky situations – most recently during the Hitler Youth’s honorary service at the 1936 Olympics, when he had just managed to wrest an autograph from his running idol Jesse Owens before dark clouds began gathering above him: Fritz accidentally witnesses a suicide, the circumstances of which are more than questionable. But the police and his foster father don’t believe him. Even worse: the Gestapo wants to get him for something he didn’t do. He has no choice but to flee and go underground.
With a forged passport, Fritz starts working for a coal merchant in Berlin-Mitte. The pay is fair, his boss is decent, but Fritz is alone and misses his friends. Especially Charly, who was once his foster mother. And his partner-in-fate Hannah, about whom all he knows is that she is hiding in Breslau under a false name. And so Fritz begins to write letters from his cover. They are substitutes for the conversation partners he desperately needs, because things are getting dangerous for him again. Because now it isn’t just the Gestapo that’s looking for the disagreeable witness – an even more deadly threat lurks even closer by…
