A very well-written piece of disillusion by a successful East German playwright. As one might except from a dramatist the brief encounters of the protagonist, a solitary woman doctor, are particularly well portrayed. Brief, limited encounters with her ‘distant lover’ whose very (emotional) distance she welcomes after the painful collapse of her marriage — ‘The distance between us gave our relationship a cool familiarity that I found pleasant. I had no desire to reveal myself completely to another person again. I enjoyed caressing another’s skin without wanting to crawl inside it.’ Further brief encounters are with other lonely denizens of her apartment block; like old Frau Ruprecht living alone with a menagerie of cagebirds who become the only witnesses to her death.

The key relationship of the book between the doctor — whose hobby is photographing ruins — and her lover Henry, a nihilistic and bored architect whose hated work is designing nuclear power stations is well delineated, catching the predicament of people existing in a fundamentally unsympathetic human environment. To some extent this is the world of East Germany, as there are references to the persecution of Christians as potential dissidents, to the suppressed East Berlin workers’ uprising in 1953 as well as to the prevalence of neighbour spying on neighbour on behalf of ‘the authorities’; but it is also the prim, competitive world of the North German middle class that is being exposed.

More to the point perhaps, is that this is finally a very European book, full of the boredom and sense of empty lives lacking adventure that are found everywhere amongst the moderately well-off in settled, well-organised societies.

‘To be sure, I didn’t understand why it was so bad that he’d had an affair with a student. When I said this to my mother, she decided to enlighten me. Alarmed by the goings-on at school, she did it with a vengeance. Along with my illusions she destroyed my loveliest dream, the hope of growing up quickly. I didn’t want to marry any more, or at least, I wanted to marry very late. I knew now you absolutely had to avoid getting involved with a man too soon, that it took years to be sure of his love, that every woman was allowed to love only one single man, for whom she had to save herself. Terrible diseases, wasted figures covered with scabs and pus, a life whose only desire was death — these were the stern, insistent ghosts that pursued me for years. I was sixteen before I let a boy kiss me. And I rushed home afterwards to scrub myself from head to foot.’ p120