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In 2007, Ingo Schulze published a collection of stories called Handy. Dreizehn Geschichten in alter Manier. The title seems to suggest that Schulze has left his usual topic of the socio-economic East-West scene behind and has discovered new ground: namely challenges or potential problems of the age of technology and cyberspace. Yet the scene in many stories is the old one: the majority of the featured protagonists are former East Germans, trying to make sense of their bewildering lives. In leitmotivic form, the cell phone, with all its pros and cons, functions as an expression of the newcomers' irritations as well as their enthusiasm for new challenges. Above all, however, the cell phone functions in many stories as a threatening symbol of exposure to pressures and problems that make East(ern) Germans feel ill at ease.
Over the years, Ingo Schulze has gained the reputation of being a convincing recorder of the turmoil during the Wende of 1989, as well as of the ensuing social problems for East(em) Germans in the aftermath. His prize-winning masterpiece Simple Storys (1998) and the lengthy novel Neue Leben (2005) portray simple and disoriented Eastem German people who try to find their place in a society which is fundamentally alien to them. In his collection of Simple Storys, Schulze relied heavily on the stylistic devices of the American short story, a literary genre which he studied extensively when he spent a year in New York City on a scholarship: 'Es war Zufall, daß ich nach Abschluß meines ersten Manuskriptes Raymond Carver las. Plötzlich hatte ich einen Ton im Ohr, mit dem ich meine hiesige Gegenwart ansprechen konnte'.1 Influenced by writers like Carver, Hemingway, Ford, and Anderson, he wrote about ordinary, small-town people whose lives are changing so rapidly that they feel out of control: maybe the bottom has fallen out, maybe they have a close encounter with a catastrophe, or maybe they stoically go about their business because there is nothing else to do. They look at their lives with ambivalence, enjoying their newly won freedom, yet experiencing feelings of powerlessness and incomprehensibility. The language Schulze uses to depict their states of mind is sparse, laconic, full of gaps, inviting the reader's judgement into the text.
Seven years after...