The Fantastic Ordinary World of Lutz Rathenow

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

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").

Editions

• 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