One Will Remain to Bear Witness

The individual in the context of contemporary history: In his superbly crafted cycle of stories, Christoph Meckel once again examines historical developments through the magnifying glass of personal experience.

"The entrance to the garrison is padlocked, the checkpoint behind it a green hut with boarded windows and a gaping door. Two dozen flagpoles moulder on the ground, a turnstile lies in the grass beside the tracks." A man enters the scene, makes his way through mud and debris, and stands before the shell of a tank. The garrison is empty, the last Russian, a boilerman, has disappeared overnight. Only one man is left to report what happened here.

In concentrated, rhythmic prose, Christoph Meckel presents images of an era that has left ruins everywhere: barrack rooms, the governmental island of a dictatorship, a monument in the desert. And each time it is the individual, the outsider, who witnesses these scenes. At the end, a very different tone is heard: the story of an abandoned child who comes to the foreground of this tightly-written volume.