Gerlitz, Claudia Förster, and fifteen-year-old Jutta Pfennig—are transported from Essen to Berlin to work in a machine parts factory. For ten hours a day, six days a week, they disassemble massive for...
Frederick said we don’t have choices, don’t own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices, Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet—I will not—...
Four years of occupation, and the roar of oncoming bombers is the roar of what? Deliverance? Extirpation? The clack-clack of small-arms fire. The gravelly snare drums of flak. A dozen pigeons roosting...
Bohyně dějin shlíží na zemi. Jedině skrze ten nejžhavější oheň je možno dosáhnout očištění. Vidí les umírajících slunečnic.
At dusk the pour from the sky.
And the skies: in one day the sky could travel from green at dawn to a noon-time blue so severe it was almost black to hot silver in the afternoon to roiling burgundy at sunset. Just before night it f...
Algumas tristezas nunca deixam de existir.
Town, it says. Depart immediately
Spinach,
Skunked
You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing
Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle, Frau Elena?
What the war did to the dreamers.
What light shines at night! He never knew. Day will blind him.
Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it.
To the bombardiers, the walled city on its granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be lanced away.
They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.
There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight indication of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.
The vice minister’s wife sits so upright that it seems as if her spine is hewn from oak.
The sky drops silver threads of sleet.