The brother spent his whole life working as an architect before he became »noticed«. He had forged documents, flooded the courts with lawsuits, embezzled funds, and chased off bailiffs with a hunting rifle. And neither the banks, nor the insurance companies, creditors, bureaucrats, judges, nor district attorneys recognized from his interactions with them the simple fact that he had long ago lost his mind. On the contrary. And the rules by which they themselves pursue this case have characteristics of equivalent madness. From a half dozen cardboard boxes of the brother`s correspondences, the narrator reconstructs the final years of a man who was an ardent admirer of Frederick the Great and to the very end was hoping to experience something similar to the »Miracle of the House of Brandenburg« of 1763. The brother`s final lawsuits are against the government, his »communist« caretaker, and the forest industry, before he finally dies of Alzheimer`s.
The narrator lives on in a foreign land. In that place, employment is a rare commodity, and whoever »makes good use of it« is held in high repute. An architect decides to make a better life for herself: as a taxi driver. A love affair comes to an end, leaving the narrator devastated. In a village in the south, he befriends a mentally ill woman, and one summer night he too hugs the horse. In one world, only those with money go everywhere, but then they cannot leave it.
Hermann Peter Piwitt
born in 1935, grew up in Frankfurt am Main, studied sociology, philosophy and literary studies and was an editor at Rowohlt Publishers. When his first work »Herdenreiche Landschaften« was published in 1965, he immediately became a literary tip - a large number of novels and stories followed; he also made a name for himself as a brilliant essayist. He has received several awards. Today, Piwitt lives in Hamburg.
