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The Fantastic Ordinary World of Lutz Rathenow: Poems, Plays & Stories, by Lutz Rathenow, is a book of poems, plays and stories written originally in German.
Synopsis
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The book consists of satires, skits and grotesqueries conveying the maddening humdrumness of the ultimate police state. It depicts "the colorless, flat, thuddingly dull DDR – the German Democratic Republic, as it called itself, or Communist East Germany, as we knew it: a sub-Soviet, sub-standard, bureaucratic parody of a society (1949–1990)." It includes pieces about
- a "little man starved of human contact and longing for romance" ("The Girl in Finland");
- a "timid bureaucrat standing in front of an office door and wondering how to knock" ("Mr. Breugel");
- a "writer facing the blank page and fearing both to write and not to write" ("The Blank Page");
- "murderous resentment" ("Professor Dr. Mitzenleim");
- "mocking defiance" ("Reasons for Refusing to Make a Statement");
- "ironic futility" ("Meditations on Peace");
- "people who are emotionally starved, anxious and futile [who] develop a perverse sense of humor" ("The Phone Call");
- people who "find grim little pleasures in their living death" ("Obituary").[1]
Editions
edit- Translated from German by Boria Sax and Imogen von Tannenberg, with an Introduction by Sax; illustrations by Robyn Johnson-Ross and Boris Mukhametshin. Grand Terrace, California: Xenos Books. ISBN 1-879378-31-0 (paper), 176 pages
References
edit- ^ Quotes are from the book's introduction by Karl Kvitko.