It’s over. Don’t go there. Short stories by Kathrin Schmidt, translated by Sue Vickerman

This collection of short stories by Kathrin Schmidt, winner of the German book prize for her novel You’re Not Dying, is set in the former East Germany. Forty years of communism blow through many of the stories, not like a breeze of fresh air, but more often like a Muff, a musty, lingering smell in the background that impinges on the consciousness at times and then recedes.

The effects of reunification in 1990 are very present too. Many characters are unemployed. Some lost their jobs because their East German qualifications weren’t up to scratch. Others, like Lucie, a secondary school teacher, in A little bit of ‘lerv’, because they’d been obedient servants of the East German state: she’d been reporting to the head on the loyalty of her pupils and their parents. These are characters hanging around at home, with time to observe their neighbours and speculate on their goings on. If they’re not the watchers, they’re intensely aware of being watched and of their neighbours’ judgement. In For Sale Idyllic Plot (subject to flooding) the parents are reluctant to send an abusive grandma to a home for fear of what the neighbours will say. Frau Bestov in the eponymous story is careful her neighbours don’t see her fishing a newspaper out of a bin. There’s a fine line between normal nosy neighbour behaviour and the legacy of the Stasi.

The past surfaces in different ways through the collection. Sometimes there’s a more generalised nostalgia for a way of life that’s disappeared, as in Balder & Sons, when the narrator returns to the stationer’s shop of his provincial childhood and notes the drawers still meticulously labelled Lead. Coloured. Ink. Or in The Death Wish when Muthild Shank recalls her former working life in a hat factory, steaming felt…trimming brims…sewing rhinestones onto the finer hats, or affixing tulle veils beneath which brides and widows could hide their joys and sorrows. At other times it’s the particularities of the communist regime which surface, often uncomfortably for the protagonists. So in Tadeusz. Full Stop, friends Pia, Berit and Silvia on a day trip to a festival in Saxony reminisce about their working lives. But when the bit of informing they were involved in suddenly comes to mind, their exuberance disappears and an awkwardness descended like a shroud. Sometimes it’s we, the readers, who are made uncomfortable—from a fleeting mention of those Red Army soldiers recalled in Fish Dish, who deserted and then roamed through the nearby forests before their inevitable deaths. Or because of an aspect of the East German regime we maybe hadn’t come across before, like Mr. Kaunadodo in Shack’s Last Laugh, orphaned as a child by the conflict in Namibia, and brought up by the East German state to form Namibia’s future elite.

But it’s not all about losing your job as a result of reunification—or revolution, as Kathrin Schmidt calls it more than once. The stories also explore more universal themes, like loneliness, love, family relationships and desire. There are middle-aged women with a hearty sex drive, one of my favourites being the protagonist in Pulling the Wool, turned on by seeing the dark hairs on her husband’s legs stand erect as she slowly pulls the duvet up to reveal his toes on cold winter mornings.( Knitters will be tickled by the opening,  It nearly undid her… (it) felt like being unravelled.) There are solitary people like Frau Bestov, measuring out their lives in small economies, like a character from Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, then finding love with Herr Luck through the small ads. (Yes, they double-barrelled their names). There are stories narrated by children, the touching On Thin Ice relating a sibling relationship and the aforementioned In For Sale Idyllic Plot where the dim little parents seem unaware of the granny’s abuse.

Now some of the stories do go a bit surreal and visceral. Sometimes there’s a sort of conflation of desire with food, rubbing mushrooms all over the body for example in Death Wish or the role of liver in A little bit of lerv. In these stories there’s also recurrent vomiting, which reaches a crescendo in Koenigsberg Meatballs, which I confess to scurrying through as I found it pretty revolting. I didn’t really get what Kathrin Schmidt was trying to do here and I feel at times she overstepped the line: surely you need your readers to be able to stomach the story sufficiently to read to the end?

But these are just a handful amongst the 31 stories in this generous and intriguing collection, so brilliantly translated by Sue Vickerman. While generally pitch perfect in her use of everyday, idiomatic English, she’s successfully rendered a range of voices, from the disparaging tone of Brigitte Bambosa in The Twilight Hour towards the geriatrics, through the cut and dried martial voice in Fish Dish, to the more compassionate voices in Cut to Shreds and O Snore all Ye Faithful. Kathrin Schmidt is also a poet with a love of word play, always a challenge for translators, but a challenge to which Sue Vickerman has found some great and humorous solutions. Similarly, when Kathrin Schmidt goes in for some sustained imagery, Sue Vickerman’s translation is absolutely on the case: I loved the opening of Buttonholed with its image of those uniform green days marching by, where Reenie Schnitzel, longing for variety, wants to pull one out of its rank and undo those gold buttons; those buffed-up, glinting buttons that made them all look so uniformly superior.

This collection will offer much pleasure both to those familiar with recent German history and to those keen to encounter its complexities and ambiguities through fiction. Many thanks to Naked Eye and Sue Vickerman for bringing it to us in English.