Star 111

»November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter, following a secret dream they’ve harboured all their lives, set out for life in the West. Carl, their son, refuses to keep watch over the family home and instead heads to Berlin, where he lives in his father’s car until he is taken in by a group of squatters. Led by a shepherd and his goat, the pack of squatters sets up the first alternative bar in East Berlin and are involved in guerrilla occupations. And it’s with them that Carl, trained as a bricklayer, finds himself an initiate of anarchy, of love, and above all of poetry.

Winner of the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize and a bestseller in German already with 150,000 copies sold, Star 111, musical and incantatory, tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family exploded by political change which must find its way back together.« (book description from the English edition by And Other Stories)

»It took Lutz Seiler, born in East Germany, thirty years to give to the moment [of the Fall of the Berlin Wall] the full richness of fertile and ambiguous human experience. With its ample narrative and powerful imagination, Star 111 is the ›Wenderoman‹ par excellence, the great novel of the ›turn‹, as German reunification is called.« Christine Lecerf, Le Monde des livres

»The Berlin of Star 111 wakes a longing for a city like no other. You want to linger there in the squatted Assel bar where workers, hookers and departing Soviet soldiers cross paths with anarchists full of ideas.« Frédérique Fanchette, Libération

»The presence of objects have is no doubt one of the most extraordinary things about Star 111. Everything is unique, everything has a price, everything is respected because it is the fruit of work or of making. Nothing is thrown away, everything kept. What if the objects have a soul? Read Star 111 (the title is the name of an East German transistor radio) and understand the real value of an object.« Cécile Dutheil de la Rochère, AOC

»Lutz Seiler reaches the level of a Thomas Pynchon here. […] This is atmospherically rich, true world literature. World literature is, after all, that which lets me see the world with different eyes, which shows me a part of the world I have not seen before. And this is what Seiler manages to do in Star 111.« Denis Scheck, SWR lesenswert

»Star 111 reveals the fiery nucleus of everything political, its dual nature: the unity of poetic rapture and the mysticism of the revolution. […] Lutz Seiler has the ability to describe the ridiculous, overheated and even the unconscionable of that political romanticism without having to denounce the original impulse. That’s what makes Star 111 great literature.« Ijoma Mangold, Die Zeit

»Star 111 is a novel full of hard-hitting, deeply moving psychology, full of scenes in which people shake the foundations of a reality that is in the process of creating new laws for itself.« Paul Jandl, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»The [goat in the novel], the reader understands, knows neither longing nor nostalgia. The fact that the novel shares, in this regard, the view of a goat, is its last and biggest virtue.« Thomas Steinfeld, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»For the second time now Lutz Seiler has achieved something rather extraordinary: to talk about how one actually leads a poetic existence, a matter that is as euphoric as it is cruel, in a novel that is ›accessible‹ in the best sense of the word.« Jan Wiele, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»Lutz Seiler talks about a city and a time that seemed to have been exhausted in fiction. But he creates a new fascination.« Jona Nietfeld, Der Tagesspiegel

»It has been a long time since anyone has talked about those foggy years, glossed over with garish colours by other writers scores of times, more movingly than Lutz Seiler.« Anja Maier, taz. die tageszeitung

»What appears in [Seiler’s] lens is a close-up of a historical moment in which the other as a possibility seemed to be within reach but disintegrated after all. The novel lens a unique voice to the power that this promise was able to unleash.« Steffen Mau, der Freitag

»Lutz Seiler‘s novel Star 111 talks about the chaotic departure in East-Berlin after the end of the GDR in a sublime way.« Cornelia Geißler, Frankfurter Rundschau

»Seiler tells a story of freedom in a poetically-precise style.« Der Spiegel

»This is much more than a historical novel. It condenses an era and invokes the great panoramas of consciousness of modernity in a highly independent way.« Helmut Böttiger, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

»This unexpected novel about post-reunification from the partially decayed, far from gentrified Berlin convinces with its unique atmospheric density, its gentle irony and the devotion to the matter at hand.« Bayerischer Rundfunk

»With Star 111, Lutz Seiler presents a great novel that talks enchantingly about departures and downfalls, about social utopias and societal realities, about humiliation and pride. Fascinating.« Katja Weise, NDR Kultur

»Lutz Seiler’s writings trace back to Uwe Johnson’s poetry and reflect the German past, present and future beyond the surface of ›simple truths‹.« from the jury statement of the Uwe-Johnson-Preis 2014

»Lutz Seiler’s stories enchant with their gentle, sweeping style« from the jury statement of the Deutscher Erzählerpreis 2010