Bridal Shower For Teacher

sketches of Berlin from the Slovenian view

open day in Berlin. Photographed on Kantstrasse

» Berlin has separated me from my body " writes the Slovenian poet Ales Steger after his two-year stay in Berlin. I was looking after him as after a torn calendar. Meanwhile, the scenes, streets, faces drawn slowly into me. The time does not exist outside of these streets, scenes and faces. Only in space, in their lavish self-consumption, get the hours a meaning. "

born in 1973, is considered the most important Slovenian writers of his generation. 2006, Suhrkamp Verlag poems by him. Now a small band with miniature pieces of strolling through Berlin. The band Prussia Park gathered impressions of places in Berlin. Bodies, wounds, open and may never healing. Steger describes bakeries and pharmacies, the U-Bahn, the KaDeWe and the Dahlem Forest Cemetery. His view is special. Exactly, sensitive, - a little Eastern European. But never predictable.

you live in this city, this juggernaut, you have become accustomed to many things, sees much inclined any more. Ales Steger striking that in almost every street is a bakery. And next to a pharmacy. "When needed a city that has eaten itself, at every step a Klestier."

The short texts breathe the speed of this single German city at the beginning of the 21st Century. The reader hears the jackhammers can feel the dust and smell the exhaust physically. He is inevitably recalls Franz Hessel, these early flaneur through Berlin. And of course, Walter Benjamin. The author observes and describes. And he evaluates. Ales Steger lives just above the Keno, a restaurant in the Lietzenburgerstrasse. "From inside the grave of Tutankhamen, a Jupiter temple, a Pantheon, a simulation of Charlottenburg and a popular meeting place for people who are called cut-throat. " months he refuses to enter the kitschy showroom, until he eventually grabs the curiosity.

Ales Steger runs through the city of dog waste, the city's welfare recipients. The city in which you midday already holds a beer bottle in his hand and show the new rich are unabashed their money and pay their vacuity on display. "The edges of the broken time are visible everywhere. to hide you to patch - that not even succeeded in by building and renovating obsessed German hands. "

The small essays are emphatic miniature pieces that manage to add atmosphere to speech. You can illuminate us what we think long for normal.

Ales Steger, Prussia Park. Berlin sketches. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2010, Edition Suhrkamp 2569, paperback, 159 pages, 10 €.