Edgar Wibeau, seventeen years outdated, has died on Christmas Eve in an unlucky twist of fate concerning electrical energy. His father, who left the family members while Edgard used to be 5, interrogates these with regards to him, to determine what precisely occurred - and who his son relatively was once. Helpfully for the reader, Edgar himself punctuates the father's conversations together with his mom, ally Willi, and Charlie, the lady with whom Edgar used to be unhappily in love, to offer us his model of occasions from past the grave - and a narrative magically equivalent to Goethe's The Sorrows of younger Werther and Salinger's The Catcher within the Rye unfolds prior to our eyes. initially conceived as a screenplay, Plenzdorf's smooth vintage was once first released in East Germany in 1973. A satire concerning the cultural and social limits of the GDR, it has lengthy been a suite textual content in German faculties, and its severe and well known luck continues to be unabated.
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