August 19, 2024
The gorgeous latest from Seiler (In Case of Loss) offers an intimate view of a German family’s reckoning with the end of the Cold War. In the autumn of 1989, as East Germany begins to fall apart, 20-something Carl Bischoff is called home from university to the small village where he was raised. With the border about to open, his parents plan to leave for a West German refugee camp. They ask Carl to stay behind—he imagines himself “the rearguard” of their house. Very soon, though, protecting his childhood home is no longer enough, as “somewhere out there, history was raging.” Carl sets off for East Berlin, where he squats in a bomb-scarred building in Prenzlauer Berg and falls in with a group of German and Russian artists and punks led by an enigmatic man who’s called Shepherd because he lives with his goat. Seiler crafts a fascinating intergenerational exploration of German reunification, as Carl comes to see his parents as people with wants and dreams like him, “as if they’d only just begun to exist.” It’s an exceptional story of fresh starts.