Sven Regener ‘Berlin Blues’

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–Sleep isn’t as important as all that, physically speaking, but lack of it will drive you crazy in the end. That’s why it is difficult to tell the chicken from the egg. Did your friend flip because he hadn’t slept for so long, or did he go without sleep for so long because he’d flipped?
–You tell me said Herr Lehmann
–A bit of both I’d say. That’s what we’ve got to find out, but it may also be a dully developed manic–depressive psychosis
–What would that mean? He asked.
–It takes time. In such cases I always recommend that patients be sent back home for therapy. The vast majority come from West Germany.

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It’s 1989 in West Berlin, West Berlin is not West Germany and attracts youth from all over West Germany because, amongst  other things, if you lived in West Berlin you were exempt from the 18 month military service in place in West Germany. Frank, who has recently become known wittily by his friends as Herr Lehmann because he will be 30 years old on the 9th November, has been a barman since his arrival from Bremen 9 years earlier, and has no other ambition. His life mostly revolves around working, drinking with his best friend Karl and sleeping. Herr Lehmann is not the sort of person who asks himself questions and then one day when he goes to the Markthalle, where Karl works, for early lunch he meets the new woman chef, who shows her capability to equal him in meaningless disputes, and falls in love:

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–Karl : What’ll you have then?
–Frank: Roast pork said Herr Lehmann who never had anything else at the Markthalle….if it’s ok for these imbéciles to breakfast till five in the afternoon, it must be ok to order roast pork at eleven in the morning.
–Katrin: If the world is teeming with assholes who breakfast till five in the afternoon she said why should we need any desperate characters who order roast pork at eleven in the morning?

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Thirty has crept up on Frank without his suspecting it and his well oiled no questions asked routine is about to be dynamited, we follow him and his often drunk friends, who work the bars and live at night with no thoughts of the future, through their routines, people come and people go in and around their bars but there is always Frank’s friend Karl, a barman by night with dreams of becoming an artist. As Frank meets Katrin and finally finds some form of acceptance for his life from his parents, he doesn’t notice Karl’s strange behaviour as he slowly drifts towards a crises, illustrated in the opening quote, which then comes to a head as Katrin leaves him. He is then alone as he sets out to celebrate his 30th birthday on the fateful 9th November 1989.

A great book, read for German lit month, if you like your humour dry and  subject matter blue then this book is for you. Some of the incidents Regener describes should remind everyone of those heady days which were our 20’s, it did me!

First published in German as ‘Herr Lehmann’ by Eichborn in 2001
Translated into English by John Brownjohn as “Berlin Blues” and published by Secker & Warburg in 2003