by Ralf Rothmann · Suhrkamp Verlag · tapa blanda · ISBN 9783518424759
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In the spring of 1945, Walter Urban and Friedrich Caroli, two seventeen-year-olds from northern Germany, are forcibly recruited. Walter is assigned as a driver in the supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Friedrich must go to the front. Friedrich deserts, is captured and sentenced to death. Walter, whose cynical superior does not listen to reason, suddenly finds himself with his carbine pointed at his best friend. In striking images, Ralf Rothmann narrates the last spring of war in Hungary, where German officers throw hand grenades at their men's heels so that they continue to attack, and the soldiers celebrate desperate orgies in the face of death. The first weeks of a peace are also narrated in which someone like Walter will never feel at home and still on his deathbed laments: 'They are getting closer and closer, man! If only I knew a place for us...'.
Ralf Rothmann is a German novelist, poet, and dramatist. His novels have been translated into several languages, with Knife Edge, Young Light, Fire Doesn't Burn, To Die in Spring and The God of that Summer being translated into English. The main subjects of his work are the bourgeois and proletarian realities of life in the Ruhr area as well as Berlin, with an autobiographically colored focus on alienation, the attempt to escape these situations, and common solitude. With the major novels Im Frühling sterben, Der Gott jenes Sommers and Die Nacht unterm Schnee, Rothmann goes back to the time of the Second World War and explores the horrors for the individual. The five volumes of short stories Ein Winter unter Hirschen, Rehe am Meer, Shakespeares Hühner, Hotel der Schlaflosen and Museum der Einsamkeit complete the author's extensive oeuvre.
