The Hearing

The young historian Anton Mühsal, a member of the ’68 generation and specialist in the early history of the Weimar Republic, is labouring on his doctorate in West Berlin in the 1980s, vacillating between two very different lovers and is suddenly haunted by visions.

An angel in the flesh drags him away from his study in the Berlin district of Moabit, then torments him with historical scenes from the November Revolution and enigmatic, surreal messages. In sequences that take place between 1919 and 1968 in Berlin, during the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, as well as under German fascism and the post-war period, The Hearing is a realistic and magical novel in one, a philosophical phantasmagoria and psychiatric case study that walks a tightrope between metaphysics and history.